


Petals all to Gray

by Chokopoppo, DesdemonaKaylose



Category: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1950s, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Crossdressing, Ensemble Cast, F/F, Fic War, M/M, Time Travel, everything but the kitchen sink to be honest
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-06
Updated: 2018-04-18
Packaged: 2019-02-11 10:47:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 59,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12933639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chokopoppo/pseuds/Chokopoppo, https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose
Summary: Edgar Vargas is no one special. An uncomfortable obsession with the reckless prodigal son of the family he works for, an inscrutable roommate with kerosene secrets, and a future which is falling apart around him all at once--Edgar has all these things, but he wouldn't dare say they make him special.Glimpse the sprawling landscape of adventure and romance from the back of a '57 Chevy Bel Air. Taste champagne and whiskey on your tongue, like the forgotten words of a song you once loved as it glides across the way.Everything is coming back around.





	1. Somehow I Never Could Believe

**Author's Note:**

> Hey y'all, this is Choko. So Dez and I are about to get in the writing version of a fist fight over A) how to write two idiots falling in love and B) how, where, and when they should be doing it. Also, we're just messing around. I guess it's about time we wrote something together, since we've been talking about JtHM for like, a decade? Man, I bet she's really kicking herself for letting me do the first chapter, and ergo the fic name, warning, rating, and various accoutrement. THIS IS EVERYONE'S TERRIBLE FIRST IMPRESSION.
> 
> So we're doing a fic war, the rules of which are detailed [here.](http://chokopoppo.tumblr.com/post/165981491697/i-have-a-dumb-idea-fic-wars) I'll be writing 1950s soap opera-esque drama-tragedy-classism-forbidden romance crap, and Dez is gonna go just absolutely hog wild on some superpower-moral-dilemma-positive-role-model shit, which means she's really branching out while I am tied, lassoed, nailed and superglued exclusively to what I know. 
> 
> Wow, this note's getting kind of long, and my laptop battery is dying. Uh, you can find me on tumblr as [Chokopoppo,](http://www.chokopoppo.tumblr.com) or Dez as [SaunterVaguelyDown](http://sauntervaguelydown.tumblr.com). Let us know what you think, and who you like more! Pit us against each other! TRY TO END OUR FRIENDSHIP. You can't. It's too powerful, probably for sure.

_On the day that we were married, I took a flower from my bouquet -_  
_And I pressed in a book, and I put the book away._  
_Sometimes now I go and take a look -_  
_The flower’s dead, the perfume’s gone, the petals all turned gray…_  
— The Aria of Anna Marraunt

———————————

Distantly, over the trees and hills populating the short walk between the estate and the garage, the strains of Silent Love filter in, emanating in every direction. The chauffeur pauses in his work, tilts his head up to listen. Quiet lips work their way around familiar words as thin hands wring soap and water out of a rag over the black hood of the car.

The Reeds family estate covers approximately four hundred acres of land, well-populated by buildings, landscaping, and commodities chosen to light the imagination of guests at their regular society parties. The indoor swimming pool for the winter and the outdoor swimming pool for the summer; the indoor tennis court for the autumn and the outdoor tennis court for the spring; the rose bushes tended to by a gardener imported from France, the windows washed by attractively blond children for several dollars a week when company is likely to see them, and by weary girls from the Czech neighborhoods for pennies when the house is empty. In every building, the staff is well-behaved and smiling, or otherwise stoically firm in their convictions and traditions. There is a piano tuner, who comes like clockwork once every two weeks to tighten the strings inside the five unused baby grands scattered in the house, and a boatman who scrapes the bottoms of the family’s three yachts in the winter, and a man of no particular title who feeds the koi in the garden pond.

And, of course, there is the chauffeur, who takes care of the eight cars in the garage and sleeps in the servant’s quarters above it, who always smells like petrol no matter how he tries to wash his status away. Like everyone else in the household, he knows his place. During society gatherings, he rolls up his carefully ironed sleeves, and peels off his shoes, and scrubs the Rolls Royce and the Chevy Bel Air and the Chrysler Imperial until his knuckles bleed and his face shines back at him in the hood’s reflections. He whispers his hopes and fears into the engines as though they could answer, and sings the family favorites when he catches strains from the band in the evening, and drinks expensive whiskey in the kitchen with the young master’s valet, and goes to bed at a reasonable hour. A cog in the machinery of a perfectly run manor.

He knows better than to change things. They all do.

———————————

There are four Reeds in all - mother, father, daughter, and son. Jonathan and Elizabeth (neé Pentet) Reeds were married in 1917. Among the wedding presents they received, special interest was paid to a library named in their honor on the Oxford Campus, a summer house in New York which has since been converted into Sax Fifth Avenue, and a Rolls Royce imported straight from Britain, along with Arturo Vargas, a chauffeur with a special interest in the mechanical upkeep of automobiles of all kinds. Arturo was polite, clever, punctual, and handsome in a refined, sexlessly tranquil sort of way. His fiancée, Amelie, a recent graduate of the greatest culinary institute in France, found easy and pleasant work in the kitchens as a head cook. They were excellent additions to the staff, respectable and well-liked by everyone, and easily faded into the background of the manor’s life.

Theresa "Tess" Reeds, their eldest, was born in 1919 as the expected and necessary but unwanted child, a chip never fully brushed off her shoulder despite her driving motivation and the work that wears her down to the bone six days a week. She organizes and manages all thirteen branches of the Reeds Refinery and Manufacturing Ltd., and has been the force between the company’s expansion since her graduation from Cornell University at age nineteen, where she was voted “most likely to leave her Alma Mater fifty million dollars” by her graduating class.

James “Jimmy” Reeds, the youngest, was born in 1938, shuffled from nursemaid to governess to tutor in a well-meaning but misguided attempt to push him along the same path as his sister. Without the deep veins of insecurity pumping blood which so motivated her, Jimmy spent most of his childhood stagnant and unappreciative of the opportunities afforded him. He has spent the past three years in three of the best colleges in the country for short periods of time, and in as many ill-conceived marriages for even shorter periods of time, and is currently listed on Tess’ tax returns as a four thousand dollar deduction. 

Life is pleasant for the Reeds, for the estate is as close to heaven as a person can get on Long Island. There is a party filling the courtyard with women in off-the-shoulder dresses and men in white smoking jackets, and the air is clean and filled with laughter and the band’s slow romantic music and the pop of a cork coming loose from a champagne bottle. Jimmy, newly divorced and almost-twenty, is avoiding his father by dancing with a woman who giggles too much. When they steal away somewhere with a bottle of sparkling wine, his family will _tut-tut_ and apologize to her mother, and ask someone on the staff to drive her home. And his sister will roll her eyes and ask him why he can’t behave _proper,_ like she does, like she knows the first thing about behaving proper. She’s in the smoking room right now, striking up bargains with businessmen.

He’s choking on it. His hand flexes around the yellow fabric of his partner’s frankly hideous dress, and she giggles like it’s flirtatious. 

Gretchen, right? Her name’s Gretchen, isn’t it? He’s pretty sure it is. Her perfume stinks of floral something-or-other, some kind of rose or lilac or whatever else they put in soap to make it more feminine. Distractedly, he kisses her neck, and she gasps and giggles and breaks apart from him as the band winds down to the song’s end.

“We’ve got to get away,” he whispers, and she leans in, eyes bulbous and fascinated, “you slip away first to the garden - I’ll come a song later. Alright?”

“Alright,” she says, and giggles behind a gloved hand. With an overtly conspicuous glance around to see if anyone’s watching, she kisses his cheek, then picks up her skirts and hurries back through the house.

He watches her go, wonders if she knows there’s four gardens on the estate - she certainly didn’t ask him to specify - then pats his jacket pocket for cigarettes and approaches the bar. His valet is waiting there patiently, hands clasped behind his back.

“Hell of a girl, huh?” Jimmy says, grinning, feeling triumphant as the bartender hands him an unopened bottle and a set of glasses. His valet side-eyes him with suspicion and something that looks an awful lot like disgust.

“Indeed,” he replies, “one might say that. I believe Gretchen was the name of Faust’s ill-gotten lover. Your description seems…apt, in such a sense.”

Jimmy shakes his head and makes a dismissive noise with his mouth. It’s probably meant to be rude. “If I wanted Kafka’s fuckin’ cockroach glooming around, I’d invite you along, Johnny,” he says, “as it is, you’re off for the night. Do some blow in my honor, huh?”

“I don’t want to know what that means,” his valet says coldly, bids him a chilly goodnight, and slides out of sight and out of mind like a black cat - skinny, elegant, and with the ominous feeling that bad luck is on its way.

Tess usually asks why he does this. Ridiculous, if she’d taken a second to think about it the way he does on the fucking regular - he can feel his family looming up around him, combing through him for something useful, something they can commodify. He can’t work, god forbid, but damn if he can’t make a woman forget her own name for about two hours.

(Could do it to a man too, if it came down to that, but the family’s pretty good about turning the other way on _that_ front.)

Jimmy Reeds is an _eligible bachelor,_ when it comes down to that. His family’s got money out its metaphorical ass, and his sister is still desperate for more. At least, he figures she’s got to be - there’s enough money for them to live comfortably for centuries, probably, but she goes to work every goddamn day except when she’s dragging herself to church, and what the fuck for? And now she’s making a list of women in their sphere, sorting them by how much their fathers make per annum per capita, trying to find a monetary boon. CEOs of companies they could use an extra push from with young, single daughters just looking to be the glue holding a monopoly together. A business partnership with him on the table, ‘cause he knows how to be romantic when he wants to be, and women don’t exactly complain when he gets up their skirts.

Maybe she’s trying to live vicariously through him. He wouldn’t know. She’s twice his age now and an infamous old maid in the private sector. Her business card is the holy grail of New York City - her presence is poison. That’s why she sticks to the smoking rooms and why he swoops up girls by the armful and pretends to like their company.

His time’s limited. Once Tess finds the _right girl,_ that’s it. His ass is grass and he’s gonna be prepping to stroll on down the aisle yet again, listening to his family fervently praying that this time it sticks, please Jesus we can’t pay for another honeymoon divorce.

So he’s gonna waste his evening fooling around with Gretchen, maybe get his dick sucked, who knows, maybe he’ll get lucky. She looked like she might be freaky, it might actually be worth it, you never know. Drive her home at two in the morning and act like he’ll call. Live life like it’s worth doing, and all that.

———————————

Edgar Vargas has the job he has because his father died around Christmas, and the Reeds didn’t have time to find a new chauffeur between their ten annual parties in December, and when Arturo’s son volunteered to work for a lower pay grade as a starting salary, it was just more convenient, socially and financially. The paperwork was signed and finished in Miss Reeds’ home office, notarized officially and witnessed for its legality, et cetera. He’d signed over his life and listened to the secretary explain the rules and regulations of when he was allowed to grow facial hair and what time he was expected to be up in the morning and the prohibition of alcohol on the premises, following the example of Mr. Ford. He watched Miss Reeds take a phone call and step out of the conversation, an important business call she couldn’t miss, understand, and he thought about his father, still lying peacefully in bed.

So when he was seventeen, he drove Mrs. Reeds to the hairdresser and Miss Reeds to the office, and his mother to the funeral that he had to leave early because Mr. Reeds had an important meeting with the board of directors at Ford, and he didn’t cry because there wasn’t any time, and he didn’t mourn because there wasn’t enough room above the garage for both his mother’s grief and his own. And he followed a schedule and stayed clean-shaven and sober, except for all the whiskey and wine. 

He’s shuffling a well-worn deck of cards by the window, listening peacefully as the band breaks out in _Moonlight in Vermont,_ when Johnny cracks the door into the servant’s quarters, scowling and scraping his boots on the welcome mat like no one else can. Edgar smiles at him and sets out another glass. 

“Long night?”

“You have no idea.”

“Want a drink?”

“Alcohol is sin.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Edgar says, unscrewing the cap on a bottle of Calvert Whiskey and topping his glass off. Across from him, Johnny settles into a chair and pulls off his gloves.

“Oh, I didn’t say _no,_ ” he says, and smiles as he pulls not one, not two, but _three_ bottles from the voluminous shadows of his coat. Edgar whistles appreciatively.

_Clean-shaven and sober._

His mother had pretended not to cry the first time he’d worn one of his father’s old ties to work. And she had fussed with his hair every time she caught him in the morning, and offered him wine every night before bed. She had been a soft-hearted woman, growing softer by the day. Respectable, well-liked by everyone. The empty place in her bed changed her - greyed her hair and wore lines into her face.

Though the Vargas’ were resilient, especially against the sorrow that rallied thick around them like a pox upon their house, Edgar’s not sure he would have made it through without Johnny. The miserable little twig had rolled into his life a few years ago, just another Gentleman’s Personal Gentleman in the streaming river of valets trying to prove their worth. Edgar had smiled when they met, shaken his hand, and started taking bets from the other servants on how long this one could last under Master Reeds. A week? A month? How long until he had to clean scorch marks off of marble, or clear the music room of fifteen broken bottles of wine? Where was the breaking point? Dead rats in the young master’s sock drawer? The pervasive stench of marijuana smoke that bit into his clothes like mothballs? They waited.

And waited.

And in that time, Edgar had started to get attached. Friendly, even. He’d never bothered with valets, before (did _anyone_ bother befriending a mayfly?), but Johnny had a way of reeling you in. He talked constantly, bending the ear of anyone who would listen, from philosophy to literature to just complaining about his day. Mostly, he talked about the young master, and what a pain in the ass that obnoxious little shit was, and Edgar had grown compelled.

See, despite a job solely dedicated to one-on-one interpersonal contact with the family, Edgar hasn’t seen James Reeds in at least ten years, not since they were children. The prodigal child had been sent off to boarding school in his adolescence following an incident with a firecracker in the foyer, and upon his return seemed so self-possessed that he refused to be driven by anyone else, anywhere, at any time. That serves Edgar fine, since he’s sure he would balk at going to the kinds of clubs that Master Reeds apparently frequents, but it feeds his curiosity nonetheless. 

“Fucking kid,” Johnny is saying even now, and Edgar smiles accommodatingly as he deals out two hands of Old Hell, “he’s taken to calling me by my first name again, but only because he knows it riles me up. Shit! I should never have let it slip. Then again, he probably would’ve gotten it from his sister if he wanted it. If that nasty little pest is anything, he’s persistent. Like a cockroach that won’t die.”

“Is their relationship close?” Edgar’s ears have perked up despite himself. He regards the bony creature across from him with careful contemplation. “Miss and Master Reeds, that is. I always got the feeling they had some…distance between them. She mentions in the car sometimes that she despairs for him.”

Johnny shrugs, then frowns pointedly as he looks at his cards. Edgar doesn’t think he even knows the _meaning_ of the phrase ‘Poker Face’. “It’s ‘complicated’, more than anything,” he admits, “the kid definitely resents her, that’s for sure. Too much of a parasite to work for himself.”

“Now, that’s not fair,” he replies, “he’s young, you know. And he’s of a different time. He was born after the Depression, wasn’t he?”

He scowls. “Lots of people were born after the Depression,” he says, “that kid’s got _issues._ His sister gives him second chances by the bucketful and he fucks them up every time. If anyone had given me a chance like _anything_ he’s been given - “

“Sour grapes,” Edgar cuts him off, warningly. Something flashes on his glasses. “We are fine where we are, my friend. Don’t waste your time ogling your neighbor’s yard.”

And maybe it’s the way his jaw tenses, or the way his fingers flex on the cards, but Johnny’s motor mouth pauses, changes direction. He complains about the champagne, instead, and about the smell of gasoline penetrating Edgar’s clothes.

———————————

“Has anyone seen Gretchen?” Asks her mother, and Tess frowns. If Mrs. McArthur is enough distressed to appear in the smoking room -

“Let’s step outside,” Tess says, not unkindly, and guides the woman through the door with one hand while stubbing her Craven out in the ashtray with the other. The fresh, temperate air envelops her, floods her with music. She coughs. “Now, where did you last see her?”

Mrs. McArthur shifts awkwardly. “Well,” she starts nervously, “I last saw her dancing with your brother - “

Ah.

“ - But that was almost two hours ago, and no one’s seen her since - “

‘ _I bet not._ ’

“ - And I know nothing really bad has happened, and Gretchen _is_ an adult, after all - “

‘ _Depends on what you consider “bad”._ ’

“ - But she drove me here, and she has the keys to my car,” she finishes, wringing her hands helplessly, “so if I can’t find her, I can’t get home.”

Tess smiles appeasingly, and sets a hand on Mrs. McArthur’s tense shoulder. “Please don’t distress yourself any further, Mrs. McArthur,” she says, “we’ll find your car. And your daughter. But looking at the time, I expect you’re feeling very tired. I can drive you home, if you’d like.”

“Oh, _thank_ you - would you? - too kind, _too_ kind,” she says, flustered, and Tess smiles and ‘of course’s and ‘don’t trouble’s her, all the while guiding her to Mrs. Van Horne for a conversation on household financial management. When women all and sundry seem contented and relaxed, she slips away off the patio, and starts the long walk down to the garage.

Damn that kid. What’s wrong with him? Why can’t he just _behave_ , why can’t he just take that job she’s been offering him? She aims and kicks a small rock down the path on the toetip of her shoe. Maybe she could convince him to take music lessons or something. Get him to do something with himself…

So deep in thought as she sends herself, it isn’t until she’s made her way down to the garage itself that she realizes - with a curse - that the keys to the Ford are back at the house. It’s nearly a five minute walk between the two buildings, and though her heels are sensible and low, her feet are beginning to ache. The lights on in the upstairs fill her with no small relief. Vargas has a five AM wake-up call, and has surely been asleep for hours - but perhaps one of the other servants can retrieve a spare key for her.

Aching feet carry her up the stairs.

———————————

Edgar is in the middle of sweeping his seventh consecutive trick out from under Johnny’s unwitting and aggravated feet when they hear the knock on the door. He doesn’t think much of it - most of the servants just kind of barge in, but there’s nothing wrong with politeness every now and again. “It’s open,” he calls, cheerfully, and pulls trump as his companion curses.

But when the door opens, it’s not Charisse or Augustus or any of the exhausted maids or waiters hired just for late evening events. It’s their employer.

Both men as one scramble to their feet, just as lost and confused as she is but deeply trained in their manners. Mis Reeds is dressed sensibly in black, skirt below the knees, neckline above the collar, but the whispers of glitz and glitter at the hems set her apart from the bare feet and shirtsleeves of her employees. She raises an appeasing palm. “Please, gentlemen,” she says, “stay seated. I apologize for my…intrusion…”

She trails off, and Edgar watches her eyes in silent horror as her gaze focuses on the bottles of whiskey and champagne sitting barefacedly on the table.

Everyone freezes. Johnny’s eyes dart back and forth between the door and the window, as though contemplating all possible exit routes, looking fervently as if he was reevaluating every decision in his life and regretting each one in its turn. Tess’ gaze wanders slowly over every item on the table, from their contraband champagne to Johnny’s discarded black gloves to the cards which, while not illegal by themselves, indicate a propensity of gambling not socially acceptable in New York. Edgar, personally, is just staring her down, desperate for any facial cue, any twitch, _anything_ behind that marble facade. He’s beginning to suspect playing cards against _her_ would be a nightmare.

She recovers first - or, if nothing else, she speaks first. “I know this is your personal time,” she smoothes over, “and I’ll be right out of your hair, but I seem to have forgotten my spare key up at the house. Could I borrow yours, Vargas? I just need to drive Mrs. McArthur home.”

Edgar says “Of course,” exactly when Johnny says “Mrs. McArthur - Gretchen McArthur’s mother?”

A lifetime of manners and bad experiences has thoroughly beaten all curiosity out of Edgar, and he knows better than to stick around when Johnny starts asking difficult questions. The cabinet with the spare keys is in the kitchen. No need to stick around here.

“That’s right,” Tess answers just as he steps out, “what about her?”

“Then why doesn’t _she_ drive her mother home?”

“Because we can’t find Gretchen,” she says cooly, as though Johnny might be personally responsible for the absent girl. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

There’s a pause. Edgar hurriedly jangles the keys in the cabinet to keep it from sounding like he’s listening in, which of _course_ he’s _not_. Johnny sniffs. “Only as much as you do,” he says.

“Be careful, Carson,” she replies, “do you know how thin that ice under your feet is?”

“Found them,” Edgar announces, loudly, before Johnny can say anything else from where Edgar definitely can’t hear him, and pushes his way back into the room, key held triumphantly above his shoulder.

Tess doesn’t look at him - behind those horn-rimmed glasses, her eyes are dark and impenetrable, and her lips and jaw are set like cut diamond. “Thank you, Vargas,” she says, glare boring into Johnny’s unflinching face, “as always, your professionalism is admirable and appreciated.”

Johnny’s head doesn’t turn, even as she moves to take the keyring from Edgar’s waiting hand. Every muscle is tense and frozen under his skin, but unmoved. Nervously, Edgar glances between him and their employer as she walks back to the door.

“Well,” she says, stopping uncomfortably, “thank you for your time. Goodnight, gentlemen.”

And then she is gone.

Edgar doesn’t breathe out until he hears the car start, and even then, he doesn’t know what to say. “What just - happened?” He asks, because it’s better than ‘ _are you okay_ ’.

He sighs low, like the air is being punched out of him. “What,” he says, “a _woman._ ”

“Um,” says Edgar.

“That _poise_ , that - that _demeanor!_ Stone-cold and demanding. And so confident, as though the world belonged to her. Did you see the way her eyes focused like some kind of _apex predator?_ The way - “

“ _Johnny,_ ” Edgar interrupts, “we’re going to get _fired._ ” And he points at the whiskey and various accoutrement crowding the table.

Johnny looks at Edgar, and then at their playing field. “Oh,” he says, squinting, “oh, fuck.”

———————————

Tess doesn’t say anything when she gets back to the house, or as she drives Mrs. McArthur home. She just thinks. Long and hard.

———————————

Jimmy readjusts his tie and glares himself down in the mirror. Despite all his scrubbing, there’s still lipstick on his neck.

Bitch. Where the fuck did she get off, acting like they were some kind of _thing,_ like she had any fucking leverage on him. Why didn’t she get it? Why don’t _any_ of them get it? He can feel a phantom hand on his shoulder, and shrugs off a touch the mirror confirms not to be there.

But he’s in control. Fuck, he’s got it, now, even with gaudy red on his skin - anyway, that could be blood if he wanted to believe it, or brain matter, or an exposed muscle or something, you know, cool and gruesome or whatever. He watches his own eyes in the mirror. He’s got _power_ like this, he looks _good_ like this. Dangerous. Anger seething in his eyes - he could kill, he could die this way. Blood in his ears, muscles tense in his arms.

His reflection smiles - after a minute, Jimmy does, too.

The party’s kind of settling down - most of the irresponsible types (himself included) have already dipped, off to bone down in some secluded room or just off the property to the Drone’s Club or some other party, louder and later. And most of the well-meaning heirs have studiously stuck around to drive their parents home, or drawl pathetically about the stock market or whatever. Tess’ people.

He thinks about going for another bottle of champagne, seeing if the bartender is down for, like, seven minutes in heaven or something in exchange, he kind of looked like a virgin and who knows, maybe it’d be worth his while - but there’s that gaudy yellow dress on the back patio, and he turns quickly to hide his face, looking for a place to slip away to. The back of one tux is pretty much the same as the next, fortunately, and (patting himself on the back for his quick thinking) he steers himself into the smoking room.

There’s no one in there, though. No one but his dad and his sister, who is almost shouting and pink in the face. He closes the door behind him and steels himself for the impending lecture.

“ - They had _three bottles_ of champagne from _this party,_ how can you not - “

“Hey,” Jimmy interrupts. His sister stops in her verbal tracks and whirls around, glasses off and in her hand for maximum eye-bulge.

“And _where_ have you _been,_ James Oliver Reeds?” She snaps. “It has been _three hours_ since _anyone_ last saw you. Making love to a guest in your mother’s house? I had to drive Mrs. McArthur home myself. I was - “

“How is our mother, anyway?” Jimmy says, lazily setting his hands in his pockets. “Drunk upstairs?”

“Don’t try to change the subject,” she replies, but already the blood is draining from her face - bless her, she can’t hang on to rage the way he can, too red-hot for those ice water veins - “sometimes I think you don’t realize how we worry, James. We were looking for you for half an hour - “

“Must not have been _listening_ too hard, then.”

“Now,” says their father, clearly falling about thirty seconds behind the rest of the conversation, “don’t talk about your mother that way.”

“Dad, what are _you_ even still doing up, anyway?”

“As it _happens,_ ” Tess interjects, light glinting off her lenses as she puts her glasses back on, “your father and I were discussing the delinquent behavior of your valet.”

 _That_ throws him for a bit of a loop. Usually, by this point in this lecture, his sister sighs and lights a cigar and lets his father list all the boring shameful shit their ancestors got up to and how _even they_ would be ashamed, something-something _look at your sister_ , et cet., et cet., whatever. It hadn’t really occurred to him that they’d been talking about something other than him, and he’s not sure if he should laugh or choke. Shit, he doesn’t practice for being surprised. Is there a cool way to look surprised? From the way Tess is smiling, whatever it is, he’s not doing it.

He closes his mouth, then opens it again. “ _Delinquent behavior,_ ” he says, disbelief in every syllable, “Carson?”

“I can only imagine where he learned it from,” she says dryly. “I found him in the servant’s quarters with three bottles of champagne from this house.”

“Which I gave to him,” Jimmy lies, quickly, because if he’s anything, at least he’s not a rat, and Jesus, he owes Carson like ninety percent of his life at this point. That gloomy little monster isn’t going anywhere. “Did you even bother asking him where it came from?”

“I didn’t,” Tess says, “because - as he was clearly flattered by your _charity_ , he must have forgotten to remind you - there are rules against the usage of alcohol on our premises in this household. There are very strict sobriety rules for our employees.”

Their father coughs. “What about the other chap?” He says, and Tess’ face contorts for a fraction of a second into something Jimmy can’t recognize. “This Vargas? You said he was drinking, too.”

“I did not,” Tess replies, stiffly, “I said he was _awake_. There’s nothing wrong with being awake.”

“But he was aware of this valet’s behavior and chose not to inform us of it,” he says, and lights a cigar, “and you said yourself that you don’t know how long this has been going on. Seems to me that it’d be safer for our finances in the long run to just get rid of both of them and be done with it.”

“Carson, sure, but Vargas?” And maybe he’s imagining it, but it sounds to Jimmy like there’s a hitch of _panic_ in her voice. “After _forty_ years, you really expect me to let him go just for being awake in his home?”

Feeling left out and unwilling to listen to an argument not directed at or about him, Jimmy tries to elbow his way back into the discussion. “Why not?” He sneers. “That’s what you’re trying to fire Carson for, isn’t it?”

“Oh, go to bed, you _absurd_ child,” Tess snaps, “I’ll talk to you tomorrow - “

“He has _not_ been on our payroll for forty years,” their father is saying, “we hired his _father_ in ’17, not him. A last name is not a guarantee of employment, Theresa - “

“Oh, like you know anything about the hiring process on this estate, you haven’t done shit to hire anyone in half a century. And if you had, you’d know that we’re on thin ice for even _giving_ him that job in the first place - “

Jimmy doesn’t listen to anything else they have to say. Their voices are pitching louder and louder, as usual, swept up in their own stupid disagreements and the anger they can’t control, and he doesn’t have time for it. He slips out through the next door and leaves his stupid family behind, crawls through one of the open windows, and saunters through the grass.

He needs to tell Johnny what’s coming, and fast.

———————————

Edgar shuffles the cards and watches Johnny pace back and forth like he’s trying to wear holes in the carpet. Usually, moving his hands helps him figure out what to do, but his thoughts are silent, and the cards unhelpful. All he can see are scenarios, playing out, each one worse than the last.

“We should quit, right?” Johnny is saying, skulking like a kicked alley cat. “They can’t fire us if we don’t work for them.”

“But we’d need letters of recommendation from the estate if we wanted work elsewhere,” Edgar replies, “word travels fast on Long Island. We couldn’t get work anywhere in the _state_ , if it came to that.”

He shrugs. “I have other employers,” he says, “and my position is legendarily stressful in the valet business. It’s no black mark against my career to be fired from working with the little demon. I’m more worried about you.” He turns those dark eyes on Edgar, giving him a strange and piteous look. It feels like being caught in a set of floodlights.

“Yeah, well.”

“Are you going to be alright?”

“Probably not.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.” Edgar shifts in his seat, hands still working, side-shuffling into his palm. “I started working here when I was seventeen. I don’t have prior work experience.” ‘ _And this is my home,_ ’ he thinks haplessly, ‘ _this house is where I was born, where I grew up._ ’

It’s where his mother died, slowly wasting away in the same bed that took his father.

“I’m sorry,” Johnny says, and Edgar blinks. He’s never heard Johnny apologize for anything to anyone. “This wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t here.”

“It’s not your fault,” he says, “I guess I was bound to get caught, one day or another. I drink enough to deserve trouble, with or without you. I’m not - “

The door slams open. Edgar drops the cards, scattering them on the floor.

“Johnny, dude, you’re in _so_ much trouble,” the intruder says, and turns his head towards Edgar - and they lock eyes, and it

Burns, somehow, like a bolt of lightning splitting a tree into pieces and lighting the wood, but it’s

Frozen and sharp, all black eyes and distant galaxies in an iceless vacuum killing light and sound and

“Yes, we _know,_ ” Johnny says, and Edgar’s attention is snapped away, wind rushing in his ears as he’s flung back down to earth, all the air knocked out of his lungs. He looks down and sees the game of fifty-two pickup he apparently decided to play with himself, and groans. “What are you doing down here?”

“I came here to warn you, obviously,” the intruder says, “my sister’s totally on the rag. You’re fucked. Who’s the guy with glasses?”

“Vargas,” Edgar says, four cards now in his hand, “Edgar Vargas. I’m the chauffeur for the house.”

“Oh,” he says, “I’m - “

“I know who you are, Master Reeds.”

“Oh,” James Reeds says, and Edgar realizes he was holding his hand out to shake. Before he can figure out what to do with that, it darts back into his pocket like a panicked fish. “Vargas. Right.”

There’s a pause.

“Should I go?” Edgar says, starting to feel uncomfortable. James is _in their house_ , apparently here to talk to Johnny, but he won’t stop staring at Edgar, and he can feel those eyes on the back of his neck. “I don’t really need to be here. I can leave.”

“Nah, stay,” James says quickly, “this concerns you, too. My sister’s totally arguing on your behalf up at the house, you know. I guess she’s pretty impressed with you.”

“With us?” Johnny says. His voice is almost painfully hopeful.

“Nope, just Vargas,” James says, “she wants _you_ out. But _I_ argued your case.”

“Did she care?”

“Nah, she thinks I’m an idiot.”

“You _are_ an idiot.”

“Okay, but I tried my best,” he complains, looking like a petulant child, “I totally could have let you get slandered in there. Give me a _little_ credit.”

“Um,” Edgar interjects, and the two men turn to glare at him - and, looking at it from outside, they look like a set of twins in various states of dress, all dark eyes and gaunt cheekbones and untidy black hair. Also, they’re both equally irritated by him right now, which is…fine. It’s fine. “Sorry, but how does this concern me? It’s so late it’s starting to get early, and if I’m getting fired tomorrow, I’d like to get in as many hours as I can so I can get a train ticket out of here.”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” James says, waving his hand passively, “I can fix this, easy. We just need to make it never happen, you know?”

Edgar stares at him. “Um,” he says, “no?”

James shakes his head pityingly. “Whatever, I’ll explain on the way,” he says, “but we’ve got to get going, or we won’t make it by dawn, you feel? Sometimes that’s just how it goes.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I’ll drive.”

“Hey, wait - “

“Come _on,_ ” James snaps, “we’re losing moonlight. You coming, Johnny?”

“No thanks,” he says, and sniffs, “I don’t need the hassle. You two have fun. I’ll be finishing off this delightful bottle of whiskey.”

“Wait - “ With a start, Edgar feels a hand grab his wrist, and jerks it away in a panic. He looks helplessly at Johnny. “What - what is going on?”

Johnny looks back, and takes some pity. “You won’t believe it if we explain,” he says gently, “just go. Nothing bad is going to happen.”

And whether Edgar believes him, or trusts the universe more than he’s ever been taught to, or is possessed by his overwhelming curiosity, he doesn’t pull away as James’ thin hand wraps around his wrist again, slower but definitely there. And he lets the kid pull him out the door - but as he leaves his home behind, he pockets the ace of spades, just in case.

He has a feeling he’s going to need it.


	2. Endless Night

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Every night and every morn,  
> some to misery are born.  
> Every morn and every night  
> some are born to sweet delight,  
> some are born to sweet delight,  
> and some are born to endless night  
> -William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

The further you go, the harder it is to get home.

The first time Jimmy walked through, he was six years old and crying in the gardens outside a Christmas party where he’d been dressed up in itchy little holiday clothes and paraded around until his head swam. He’d started crying, who the hell knows why, and his mother had shunted him off to the kitchen with the nanny for a heavy dollop of whiskey and big yellow antihistamines, which he hadn’t wanted to take because the pills hurt his throat, and between all the yowling and wriggling he’d ended up clutching a black eye in a puddle of expensive brown liquid and glass shards.

He remembers the glass shards. He remembers the way the corners caught the light, like a chandelier, and it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. And he remembers how the shard had gone dull in his hand, flat and ugly and bloody, taking a bite out of him like an ungrateful dog. He thinks about that moment a lot. It feels like it means something, but he’s never been able to figure out what.

So there he was, out in one of the four gardens, fuck knew which one, hiding from all of it in a gap between the hedges, when Edgar Vargas found him.

When Jimmy remembers the Vargases, he remembers hands first. Broad hands, gentle movements and rough palms, like shy wrens hiding in the undergrowth. He knew Arturo best. Back then, Jimmy had followed his parents’ chauffer from room to room like a shadow, fascinated by his soft voice and towering body, the weirdly pretty lilt of his accent.

When Arturo’s son sat down next to him in the grass, Jimmy had stopped crying, and then abruptly started crying again, afraid that Edgar would leave if he wasn’t sufficiently distressed.

“Can I see your hands?” Edgar had asked. He put out his own palms and waited, patiently.

When Jimmy turned over his hands and held them out, Edgar had taken them very carefully and inspected the cuts. Probably they were jammed full of dirt and bits of gravel from the driveway at that point. All Jimmy remembers is that they stopped hurting the second Edgar touched them.

“Gosh,” Edgar said. “You really cut yourself up. Let me find your mother, okay, Master Reeds?”

And of course Jimmy cried even harder. You gotta wonder where kids get the energy.

“Okay, okay,” Edgar had said, nervously. “Well then, we’ll just… wait here for her to come get you.”

So they sat there for a while, Jimmy sniffling into his sweater and Edgar quietly observing the garden. He’d been a real wimpy kid. Oh sure, a hellion no doubt, but not a lot of stamina to keep it up. The second somebody made a sympathetic face at him, he’d flop down and give up. Thank god boarding school knocked that shit right out of him.

“You cry a lot for a boy, don’t you?” Edgar had said, because he was probably twelve or something and couldn’t help being an asshole. And then, because he was only sort of an asshole, he said, “My dad always said it made him nervous when I didn’t cry. When he was a kid, boys cried a lot more.”

“My dad says if I don’t man up he’ll whip my ass,” Jimmy reported, sullen and still a little wet at the edges. “I’m not going back.”

“So where are you gonna go instead?”

Jimmy stuck out his chin. “You can hide me. I can go home with you.”

Edgar shook his head. “The house I live in belongs to your parents.” After a strange moment, in a voice that Jimmy could barely hear and desperately wanted to understand, he added, “Everything does.”

“Who cares,” Jimmy said. “When I grow up you’ll belong to me.”

And Edgar had given him a weird, uncertain look, and opened his mouth to reply, and then they had both heard the sound of a woman calling. Edgar stood suddenly and moved towards the sound—and Jimmy had panicked, racing after him into the darkness and the crisscrossing hedges, a labyrinth to an idiot six year old—he lost sight of the older boy—the air crackled and thickened, like the overture of a lightning storm—

And Jimmy had emerged into a cold grey morning, the threat of snow wet and brooding overhead.

He was gone for twelve hours. He expected to be in big trouble when he turned up, as freshly bloody and wet with whiskey as he had been the evening before. In fact, during his absence his nanny had quickly mopped the kitchen up, put away the glass, and gone to bed. His parents never said a thing. The only sign that he’d been gone was the garage, where the Vargases had torn the damn place apart looking for him.

Now, in a different darkness—a floral darkness, thick with some kind of gardenia as heavy as an old maid’s perfume—Jimmy cranks down the window with his free hand, narrowly missing a mailbox in the process. They’re on a twisty old set of private roads, and he can smell it in the air: that lightning smell, the spot where two moments diverge. He takes a deep drag of his cigarette.

What Jimmy tells Edgar isn’t the twee little Christmas story. Who the fuck wants to hear that?

“So here’s the thing,” he says. “You ever take a walk somewhere you haven’t been before, like maybe a street in a weird borough, and you kinda lose time?”

“Lose time?” Edgar echoes.

“Time’s a thing you can lose,” Jimmy says. “Or find, I guess. So like, when you get lost physically, it can feel like you were knocking around for an hour and it turns out you only lost five minutes?”

Edgar has his father’s gentle broad hands, and his mother’s pretty darkness. He folds and unfolds his fingers in the corner of Jimmy’s peripheral.

“I can lose time or find time,” Jimmy says. He’s frowning because Edgar isn’t saying anything, just twitching his fingers. “It’s not that hard, honestly. You just find the spot where you can feel a—” he gestures with his cigarette, trying to convey the _shape_ of it, the curve and bow and cleft, the electric fizzle. He doesn’t think he’s doing a good job.

“ _Say_ something,” he says, “Jesus Fuck, Vargas.”

But what Edgar says is, “Johnny knows about this?”

“Duh.” Jimmy taps off a flurry of ashes over the steering wheel, smiling. “One time I ditched him for a week in Sicily and he went all the way to my girlfriend’s house to tell me to fuck myself. A week before I got there. And he just waited for me. What an asshole.”

“So you’re a time traveler,” Edgar says.

Jimmy shrugs. “Not, like professionally. It’s just something I can do. Everybody’s got some dumb trick they can do. I bet you’ve got something too.”

“If I could time travel,” Edgar says slowly, “you wouldn’t catch me here, like this.”

Jimmy holds out his half-smoked cigarette. “You want some?” he says.

Edgar waves him off. “It’s not very professional.”

Jimmy laughs. “Like drinking three bottles of champagne? Christ dude, you sure can put it away.”

It’s like Edgar freezes. The air almost gets frosty around him. Jimmy rolls his eyes.

“Chill, Vargas. I don’t give a fuck. You can drink as much of my sister’s wheel greaser as you want, for all I care. Sobriety clause is bullshit anyway. Prohibition ended before I was even born.”

Edgar unfreezes, but he seems shaky. It’s quiet for a moment before he says, “I think I will have that cigarette, actually, if you don’t mind.”

Jimmy runs his tongue over the end of it, thoughtfully, and then passes it over to Edgar, who sucks it down like a drowning man. Jimmy would have to be a fucking idiot, or blind, not to find that interesting.

“So if you can fix all your problems with time travel,” Edgar says, blue smoke pouring out of his mouth, “how come you’re so….”

“Fucked up?” Jimmy fills in.

“I wouldn’t say that,” Edgar replies, and sounds like he even means it. “It’s just that the people around you seem to spend most of their time being angry at you. Couldn’t you avoid that, with your—talents?”

Jimmy perks up a little at the use of the word _talents_ , like maybe Edgar thinks there’s something cool and impressive about what he does. Johnny just calls it a headache.

“If I spent all my time trying to undo that shit, I’d never have a life,” he tells Edgar. “If they don’t like what I do, that’s their problem.”

He pulls the car over on the side of the road between two gates hung heavy with some draping purple flower. He used to have to get lost somewhere to do this, but he’s gotten better and better at it over the years. Now he can chase it down instead.

Jimmy steps out into the night and slams the car door behind him.

Edgar is hanging back somewhere behind him, nervously gnawing on that cigarette, probably. Jimmy doesn’t break his pace, sauntering over to the vine-strung gate. He doesn’t know what it opens up onto, which is the important part. It’s unlocked, hanging by a whisper on its hinges, a possibility made solid in the waning moonlight.

“You coming?” he says.

Edgar appears at his shoulder, the cherry of light between his lips nearly burned down to nothing. The air is thick enough with storm-hot ozone to just about choke a guy. Fuck, what’s Edgar into, anyways? He’s not married at twenty something, Jimmy knows. Hell, maybe there’s something there. It’s not like Jimmy hasn’t fucked the help before.

“You’re sure this will work?” Edgar asks him.

“Yeah, sure,” Jimmy says, “Like at least 60% sure. I’ve never actually tried to change something in the past before.”

Edgar whirls to face him. “Hold the phone now, I meant _will you be able to take me with you_. You don’t know whether or not you can even do this?”

Jimmy grins at him. He feels like he’s naked in a lightning storm, an invisible hurricane that crackles all around them, something Edgar can’t see but Jimmy can smell, can feel in his fingertips. He grabs the cigarette out of Edgar’s hand and tosses it over his shoulder, into the grass. He’s standing on the edge of a precipice, on the razor edge of annihilation, and he can’t ever—he could never—help but push himself over.

“Let’s fucking find out, huh?” he says.

Jimmy grabs Edgar’s arm and pulls him backwards through the gate, where they tumble into

 

* * *

 

Burning, black and hot--a bolt of lightning splitting a tree into pieces--it’s--frozen and sharp, all black eyes and distant galaxies in an iceless vacuum--killing light and sound and

 

* * *

 

They hit the ground in sweltering sunlight, and Edgar lands right on James’s chest, knocking the air out of him with a painful sounding _oof_. His ribs almost seem to creak under Edgar, a truly terrifying thought. The air is so hot it very nearly ripples, which makes a whole lot more sense when Edgar hastily pulls back off his employer’s brother to find the alleyway they’ve landed in is literally on fire. _What_ , he has just enough time to think, before a hand shoots out of the shadows and drags him sideways into the sunken threshold of a basement door. On instinct, he reaches out and pulls Jimmy after him, and by the grace of God and the whole host of saints, the flaming whip that shoots out of the inferno only smashes the ground where they were a moment before.

It writhes, like a living thing, thick and black as a car tire, and then it boils into nothing, like it never existed.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing here?” a woman’s voice hisses at them. Presumably the owner of the hand, although Edgar does not feel safe presuming anything right now.

What he can see of the alley now is the familiar shape of a street in Manhattan, the fire escape across the road dripping like chocolate rather than iron in the heat. He draws back further into the stoop and looks up into the clenched jaw and narrow eyes of a sharp-faced woman, her scandalously short hair slicked back the way Edgar remembers his fathers’ had been, old fashioned and masculine. Her ears are pierced.

There’s a _crack_ , heavy and metallic, and then another, darker woman jogs out of the wall of heat, her little white hat smoking on top of her piled hair. “Let’s see the bastard get up from that one,” she says cheerfully, sliding her gloves back onto her hands. Her big black sunglasses make her look like a jazz musician.

Edgar just flattens his hands against his knees and takes one deep breath after another, in and out, working his way silently through a Hail Mary. He isn’t dreaming, he knows, but maybe he’s losing his mind all the same.

“Who’re these guys?” the woman in the glasses asks.

“I was just asking them that,” the other woman says, managing to make it sound like a threat.

There’s a shuffling of clothing behind Edgar, and Jimmy pops up all at once, tuxedo singed and hair coming out of its slicked-back hold in spikes. “Where the hell are we?” he demands, look straight at Edgar. Now everyone is looking at Edgar.

So, to get everyone to stop staring at him, Edgar evaluates the area they’ve landed in. Aside from the fire, which is still going strong and not something he has ever seen before at this magnitude, the place actually feels familiar to him. The shape of the sidewalk, the faded advertisement painted onto the brick wall.

“We’re a couple blocks from my church,” Edgar says. The moment he says it, he’s absolutely sure.

“You’re with Our Lady of Guadalupe?” the lighter woman asks. “I’ve never seen you there.”

“Well I have a job that doesn’t give me much time for morning masses, I haven’t really been since I was… seventeen….” He stops. It’s just occurred to him that the painted advertisement on the brick wall down the alley was much more faded than that when he used to come here, more than a decade ago. The one he’s looking at now only looks a year or two past new. His mouth is dry. He clears his throat. “Master James,” he says, “where, if you’ll forgive me, the hell are we?”

James has a sour look on his face that says he’s been wondering the same thing and isn’t happy to have his suspicions confirmed. “Hey,” he says, turning towards the woman in the sunglasses, “what year is it?”

“1938,” she answers immediately, grinning at them. “What year were you expecting it to be?”

“None of your business,” James says, just as fast.

“Oh wow,” she says, “you’re a real jerk! Mr. Guadalupe, what year were _you_ expecting it to be?”

Edgar ignores James’ urgent throat-cutting motion and simply answers, “1957.”

The woman behind him makes an impatient sound. “Tenna,” she says, “will you put _out_ that fire?”

“Oh, right,” the one in the sunglasses, Tenna, says. She turns back to the raging cloudy inferno and holds out her hands, an expression of perfect blankness smoothing out her features. The fire rears back, flickers wildly, and then slinks away into smoke. Tenna wipes her brow.

All that’s left of the hellscape moments before is the sagging fire escape, the scorched pavement, and the waver of heat dying in the air. Tenna turns back to them and offers one of her extraordinary hands.

“Antonia Santos,” she says, “but my friends call me Tenna!”

Edgar wonders if touching those hands of hers is likely to roast him alive, but he’s already ignored one person’s handshake tonight—today?—and his father would be rolling in his grave if he did it again. He takes her hand. It’s warm to the touch, but no warmer than a human hand should be. Her palms are pink and healthy.

“This,” she adds, pointing to the sour looking woman behind him, “is Devi D—”

“Don’t tell them my name!” Devi snaps. “We don’t know who they know!”

Tenna doesn’t miss a beat. “We’re exorcists!” she finishes.

“We are _not_ exorcists,” Devi corrects her, creaking up to her feet. Under her long dress, split down the middle at the crossover, she’s wearing pants. “If we were exorcists, we wouldn’t stand a chance against those things.”

Edgar suddenly, achingly, wants to go home. He wants to be in his bed above the garage, sleeping off a stomach full of whiskey, in his life that never changes and never worries him and never confuses him. He wants to go to work drunk and nap off a hangover in the driver’s seat while Miss. Reeds wheels and deals somewhere floors and floors above his head, secure in the knowledge that the pattern will repeat and repeat and even if it isn’t happy at least it’s _stable—_

But his home doesn’t belong to him, and if this insane gamble goes any farther off the rails he may never go home again.

“Twenty years is a hell of an overshot,” James is saying, accusatory, watching Edgar out of the corner of his eye. He doesn’t seem to care that his hair is breaking out of its slicked hold. The impulse to smooth it back down is so strong that Edgar actually has his hand half-way in the air before he remembers his place. He goes flushed and hot from his ears to his collar.

“I’m sure I don’t know anything about it,” Edgar murmurs.

James scowls and eyes the sky, blue and bright, fresh with the morning now that the smell of smoke and iron has mostly boiled off. “This is no good,” he says. “I can't feel anything. I don’t know how to find a way here.”

Devi steps right over them both and walks over to Tenna. They confer silently, glaring at each other in the summer sunlight. They look like a mismatched set to Edgar, Tenna in her Sunday dress and Devi in her scandalous menswear. It’s not that Edgar has _never_ seen a woman wearing pants; it’s just that he remembers what his mother had to say about it, and he’s having a hard time getting his head around seeing it in the _Depression_. Also, yes, it makes him a little uncomfortable.

“We oughta,” Tenna says, but then Devi says, “I don’t want another,” and then Tenna just says, “So what then?”

James stands up and slaps the dust off his suit pants. “Well it’s been a real headache meeting you girls, but we gotta blow this pop. Tip your waiter and all that jazz.”

Devi looks at Edgar. “What the fuck is he talking about?”

“Judging from context,” Edgar starts to say, but James already has him by the hand and is levering him up impatiently.

"I mean _later,_ suckers," James says. He pulls Edgar up and turns on his heel, nearly bouncing off Devi's solid chest as he does. Edgar can feel something shift, in the atmosphere maybe. It feels like a gear clicking into place. It uneases him.

Devi says, "Where do you think _you're_ going?"

She glares at James. James glares back.

“Why don’t you come back with us?” Tenna says. “Get your bearings.”

“The fuck would we do that?” James says. His hand is still around Edgar’s wrist.

Devi puts her hand on her hip, shifting the drape of the fabric, and suddenly the dangerous outline of a pistol falls into sharp relief against her thigh. Her mouth is a thin, brown line.

“Huh,” James says. He lets go of Edgar just so that he can filch another cigarette from his pocket, jamming it between his teeth. “Well that’s different, then.”

Tenna leans over and pinches the tip of the cigarette. “Lemme get that for you,” she says, and the smoking cherry flares to life. Edgar’s hand starts to sweat in retroactive fear. She pulls back, grinning, and winks at Edgar.

* * *

 

If you asked them, Devi and Tenna would tell you they live together because rent is murder and nobody else can stand either of them at close proximity for more than a day. Devi lived in Spanish Harlem for most of her childhood, and Tenna lived in Regular Harlem, and now they live together in Little Spain in an attic above Iglesia Nuestra Senora de la Guadalupe, a flat that technically belongs to the church and which they can only afford to rent because they are, in the Parish’s terms, a couple of god fearing sinners.

Tenna was born in 1921 in the Dominican Republic, a country to which she never expects to return, to a family who had gotten tired enough of watching one regime topple onto another in an endless domino cascade that they were willing to risk their first run of good financial fortune under the USA occupation on a one-way boat ride to New York City. She is the youngest of seven siblings, a talented seamstress, and has been fired from several lucrative jobs working for the ladies of Manhattan due to her inability to keep her mouth shut. In Harlem she was always too Spanish, and now in Little Spain, she has the novel experience of being too black instead. There is a scorch mark on the corner of 14th and Seventh in the shape of one of her particularly unfortunate former lovers’ bicycles.

Devi Delacruz was born in 1917 to a mother she has never known and a father who consistently forgets not to stand over the gas stove while Devi is lighting the flame, and has consequently burned the right elbow of every shirt he still owns. Devi worked at a nightclub until the club went under, and now she works for the church to pay back her rent and Pachito the Knife to buy her groceries. In her life she has left behind a string of boyfriends, the less said about whom the better. She has only ever loved one woman, but now that she’s done it she’s not interested in going back. Devi Delacruz trusts no one and no thing, including the Blessed Virgin Mary, for whom she currently works and who will almost certainly ask her one day to make an accounting of all her small blasphemies.

They are not exorcists, but they are something not dissimilar.

Tenna hangs her hat up on the nail by the door as she leads the way in, and goes off to make some coffee. They’ve got a wood burning stove which would be pain to light for anyone else, but she has her ways, doesn’t she! Nothing like just getting your hand right under a copper kettle. Saves a billion in wood costs and smoke smell to boot.

“Grab a seat,” she says, meaning one of the broken wooden dress forms lying around the floor. They have two chairs, but one of them is covered in books and denim cuttings and the other one is next to the stove. She sits down in that one and steeples her fingers, looking over the rag tag duo in her living room. Mr. Guadalupe looks local enough, but the one in the _esmoquin_ jacket there has a hawkish anglo look to him and a suit that nobody in this neighborhood could afford in a hundred years. She knows what Devi is thinking—that they work for the fire and brimstone set, the Other Guys, or maybe they’re involved with what showed up in the alley. Tenna is reserving judgment.

Devi tosses her housekey to Sickness, who scuttles across the floor and disappears under the mess of fabric at the far end of the room. Guadalupe catches sight of Sickness’s clicking legs as it kicks up a length of lace behind it, and he absolutely loses it. One arm vice tight around Esmoquin, he throws himself back against the wall and drags the younger man after—they hit plaster with a terrified _oof_ , or at least Guadalupe does. Esmoquin just lets out a grunt of annoyance and confusion.

“What the hell is that?” Guadalupe says. His grip on his friend’s arm is making the already pale skin go white as deadwood.

Devi crosses her arms and thumps back against the door. “That’s what I can do,” she says. “So what can you do?”

“You made that?” Esmoquin asks her. He’s been pretty obvious about taking in the sights so far, but now he’s got an almost hungry look to him. Tenna frowns, to herself, but doesn’t say anything.

“I can make more than just that,” Devi replies, talking big like she usually does. Devi likes to make sure people know up front how dangerous she can be. She can’t stand the idea of anyone fucking with her. Tenna tends to go the other way, which is to say, she prefers to be underestimated whenever possible. Maybe it’s just a side effect of being a black kid with a volatile superpower, but Tenna’s never seen the appeal of putting too many cards on the table at one time.

Anyway, Devi is stretching the truth with that boast. Sickness is the only thing she knows how to make that can interact with the physical world. The rest of her illusions are clever and artful, sure, but as insubstantial as ghosts. Otherwise she wouldn’t need the gun.

Speaking of which, she unholsters her gun and lets it hang between her fingers. A warning.

"Talk," she says. “How’d you know where to find the biembiens?”

“Biembiens?” Guadalupe echoes. He’s still got his hand tight around his buddy’s arm, one eye on the place where Sickness disappeared.

Devi looks over at Tenna, exasperated. It’s Tenna’s word for the things, because she’s always having trouble figuring out what the right English word would be. “The monster,” Devi says, cutting right to the chase as usual. “How’d you know how to find that alley?”

Guadalupe looks at Esmoquin. “No,” Esmoquin says. “No way. It’s none of their business.”

Guadalupe lets go all at once, snatching his hands back like they’ve been scorched. He swallows. “Master Re—”

“Zt ztztt,” Esmoquin cuts in, “zip it, man. You’re gonna get me in trouble. I’m not even _born_ yet.”

“So you _are_  time travelers,” Tenna says. Guadalupe whips his head around and Esmoquin lets out a tortured groan, flopping his head back against the wall with a hollow _thump_. He doesn’t need to be so dramatic. It’s not like she didn’t already suspect. They're really really obvious about it.

“Well,” Guadalupe says, “he is, anyway. I’m just a driver.”

“ _Sure_ you are,” Tenna says.

Once the dam’s blown, Guadalupe lays them out a torrent of confused information. The irritable pale one just slumps there and stares up at the ceiling as his buddy tells them all about a mysterious garden and an electric darkness and an infinite cold emptiness like a chasm yawning at the bottom of the earth, and how he’s about to lose his day job probably. He’s fidgeting something terrible, and before Tenna quite notices it happen, Devi’s shuffled up their pack of playing cards and pushed it into his hands.

“I just want to get home,” he says miserably, cards flying between his fingers like an expert dealer in one of those back rooms Devi watches the doors for. “I just want to—fix this, if it can be fixed, and then go to bed.”

“Relax,” the other one grumbles. “We’re _gonna_ fix it. I just gotta get oriented.”

Tenna wonders how. She’s getting a prickly feeling off this guy, and the more he talks the less she thinks he has any idea what he’s doing. Tenna picks up the kettle and pours grounds into the coffee pitcher, bustling in the uneasy silence between them all. She makes herself a cup, and then sits down. She doesn’t offer anyone else a cup. She doesn’t know how long they’re going to be around, and coffee is about as expensive as drinking gold. As for her, she’s been awake for ten hours and has another ten probably ahead of her.

“Seems to me,” Devi says, slowly, “you two don’t have anywhere to go until you get your shit sorted out.”

Guadalupe starts absently laying out the shape of a solitaire game, nodding along. The other one bristles. “I said I _got_ it, alright? This is just a temporary setback.”

“Sure,” Devi says. The wheels in her head are turning. “But until you sort out what exactly _temporary_ means, you’re gonna need a place to sleep. And as it happens, we’ve got just the place for that.”

Tenna looks up sharply at her friend. That doesn’t sound like Devi. She’s as suspicious as a snake and as inhospitable as a mother cat. Tenna’s not even sure Devi knows how to sleep in a room with a stranger, which would explain a lot about her love life. She doesn't like where this is going, for Devi's sake more than anything.

“And,” Devi goes on, casual tone belying the sharp look in her eye, “in exchange for somewhere off the streets to change your socks, you’d only have to help us out with a couple little local problems.”

“We didn’t bring any socks,” Guadalupe says.

“Are you stupid?” Devi asks him, just as casually.

He stares at her. “No?” he says.

“Then don’t act stupid,” she says. She turns her attention to Esmoquin, and says, “Look, this isn’t that complicated. You help us track down the Biembiens, we give you a corner to sleep in. Unless you’ve got somewhere else to go?”

“We don’t know fuck all about your beebs,” he says. “We don’t even know what they _look_ like. In case you forgot, Sparky there already set the whole place on fire before we even rolled into town.”

“They come from the cold place,” Guadalupe says, vaguely, flipping over the ten of hearts. “The place between places.”

The air in the apartment goes thin and dangerous, like spring ice. Guadalupe goes on laying cards down, the faint paper sound of his fingers pushing them over the floorboards deafening in Tenna’s ear. They watch him like they’d watch a firecracker on their floor, wick merrily burning down to disaster.

“What the fuck, Edgar?” Esmoquin says, but softly.

Guadalupe looks up. He freezes when he sees them all staring right at him. The jack of spades slips out of his fingers.

“I’m—” he says, “I’m sorry, it just seemed—but it isn’t obvious, is it? I don’t even know what it means.”

Esmoquin does a fast survey of the scene—his wheels are turning, same as Devi’s were, and they’re turning fast. “Alright,” he says, abruptly. “If that’s what it takes to get a little peace in this decade, we’re in. What’s a guy got to do to get a blanket around here? I know it’s noon or some shit around here, but it’s like two AM our time and I’ve had about enough of everything for a while.”

Devi gives Tenna a significant look. Tenna gets up from the stove and digs out the winter linens, which make a basic enough pallet on the floor for a couple exhausted drifters. They’ve both got work to do and places to go today, but if Devi is alright leaving a couple weirdos alone in their house then Tenna’s not gonna call her out on it.

Devi pulls the attic door closed behind her with a click, and then the two of them are alone in the second floor of the church, cast half in light from the balcony window across the room.

“Okay,” Tenna says, evenly, “what was _that.”_

Devi inspects a heavy shelf at the back wall, giving it an experimental push. “Help me out with this,” she says.

“Devi,” Tenna says. “What was _that?_ ”

Devi is pushing on the side of the bookshelf, levering it off the floor just enough to get some space between it and the wall. Tenna just stands there and waits, arms cross, while Devi pushes the bookshelf underneath the attic entrance and slumps, panting, in exhaustion. Then she lurches forward and starts gathering things off the floor.

“Devi!” Tenna shouts.

“They know something,” Devi says, shoving books and empty drawers and everything but the kitchen sink up over the top of the shelf. “And they’re either with us or the Other Guys. We’re gonna use them before they can use us. Maybe this is the break we were waiting for, Tenna. Maybe we can finally _finish_ this.”

“I don’t like the feeling of that Esmoquin,” Tenna says. She knows what the Other Guys look like, and it’s all too familiar. “He reminds me of Cucuy.”

Devi levers the last bit of detritus between the attic door and the shelf, sealing up the only escape. God help anyone up there if a fire starts.

“I thought you didn’t want another Tess,” Tenna said, grimly.

“It’s not going to _be_ another Tess,” Devi says, her face beaded with sweat and her teeth gritted. She thumps the side of the pile and steps back, wiping sweat from her forehead. “This time, I’m making sure they can’t leave.”

 

* * *

 

In the creaking heavy darkness of the windowless brownstone attic, Edgar can’t sleep. It’s been a hell of a night, and he can’t stop thinking. He feels like a car that someone has locked the keys inside, the engine just churning and churning and growing hotter as it goes. It doesn’t help that whatever the hell scuttled under the pile of fabric in the corner hasn’t scuttled back out again, and that’s only slightly more worrying than if it _did_. Even if he could forget about that thing, laying in the dark on his other side is James Reeds. He can barely bear to breathe at this proximity, let alone sleep.

This is so far outside the parameters of his job description. This is beyond the pale.

“Hey,” James says. He says it in a regular voice, like he knows Edgar is awake and listening and takes it for granted.

“Uh,” Edgar says. He licks his lips. “Hey.”

“How come you still call me _Master Reeds_?” James says. “Like I’m a kid, or whatever?”

“Oh,” Edgar says. He never considered it. That was what he had called James before they packed him off to boarding school, and in his mind, in a way, James is still the ten-year-old standing in the living room with a smoking fizz bang in his hand. And at the same time, he’s also the relentless young man laughing wildly in the back of his sister’s Cadillac, a stranger’s skirts frothing between his knees—his laughter a relentless whirlwind, his breathless yelps scraping the rafters—the first and last time that Edgar saw him up close since they were children, until he flung open the door tonight. But Jimmy doesn’t need to know about that.

Maybe Edgar just calls him by the old name because it makes him feel more familiar.

“Apologies,” Edgar says. “I can call you Mr. Reeds?”

Edgar can hear the frown in his voice when he says, “That’s what you call my old man.”

“Mr. James?” Edgar suggests, uncertainly.

James blows out a tetchy breath. “Just call me Jimmy, _fuck_. Who the hell is James.”

“I really couldn’t,” Edgar starts to say, but James isn’t having any of it.

“You really _could_ , dude. Look, you don’t work for me, you work for my stone bitch sister. I’m just a guy who lives on the same property as you. And like, not to say I’m not gonna get us back, cause I definitely _am_ , it’s just that we could be here a while, and you’re gonna kill me if you keep up this mister so and so and master such and such.”

Edgar takes a breath. “We are going to get back, aren’t we?”

There’s a silence, and then Jimmy rolls over in the dark. His voice sounds closer when he says, “You’re goddamn right we are.”

“Okay,” Edgar says.

“Okay,” Jimmy says.

Edgar would never dream of being this familiar with Miss Reeds. Once, when he was driving her upstate to visit the house of a prospective business partner, the Cadillac broke down outside of a little farming town and left them stranded. She’d pulled on her jacket and walked to the nearest farm house, and arranged for a tow from someone in the area while she smoked her cigars over a stranger’s dining room table. Edgar had waited with the car until the tow arrived, and then he’d accompanied it back to the mechanic’s workshop, where he had slept in a chair inside the locked shop when the repairs took too long to finish in one night. He doesn’t know where Miss Reeds slept, which is the point, really. He wouldn’t know.

"Have you ever been lost before?" Edgar asks.

“Farthest I’ve ever gone was 1995,” Jimmy says. “Night of the first honeymoon, when I was seventeen. Stumbled out of a hotel in Sacramento and ended up in San Francisco. Real fucked up. Took me two weeks to find my way back.”

"Oh," Edgar says, heart sinking.

"The farther you go the harder it is to find the way back," Jimmy says. "Mostly I just fuck around for a couple days and get drunk last month when I know Tess was too busy in Italy or whatever to notice a couple of me's running around."

Edgar tries to imagine what Jimmy means when he says _fucking around_. It's an awfully understated way to describe what he's heard Jimmy can get up to, which seems larger than life to someone like him, someone with a life like his. There might be a kind of ugly glamor in that kind of willful self destruction. A beautiful thing scattered across the floor.

“What was that shit about the beebums,” Jimmy asks him, eventually.

“I don’t know,” Edgar says. He means it. He’d just been thinking about that whip of boiling blackness, crashing through the alley, and the fire and the strangeness of it all, and then he had turned his card over, and then everyone was looking at him. It didn’t seem strange when he said it. He’d said things like that before, when he was playing cards with Johnny, things that he wasn’t sure why he’d said. Once Johnny had said something about the weather, about the cold, and Edgar had replied without thinking: “Well of course you’d call it cold, considering where you’ve been.” And Johnny had said, “What?” and Edgar had said “What?”, and he hadn’t considered until later that Johnny never, ever talked about where he was from.

 

* * *

 

Three years ago, Devi was out on a terrible date with a boy from Spanish Harlem who had promised to take her to a nice restaurant and had instead ditched her on the sidewalk halfway there when a prettier woman in real nylons had flashed him a prettier smile. She’d been on a lot of shitty dates, but this was the first time she’d literally been left in the street, not _even_ in the restaurant washing dishes. And as she’d stood there, trying to figure out who the hell she thought she was kidding with this quest to find an available half-decent man, she’d seen it. In the shadows, across the street, underneath the butcher’s window.

They’d told her she was crazy. Next one up for the fruitcake factory, if she didn’t get her head on straight. But once she’d seen them, she couldn’t unsee them—they were everywhere, in the alleys, beneath the dumpsters, in the cloudy fourth story windows glaring down like animals behind the glass—black eyes, claws and feathers, wriggling slimy and skittering boney. She moved out. She locked herself away. She barred the doors and locked the windows and burned lamp after lamp down to fumes.

And then one day that wasn’t enough. One day, they were inside the house. And they knew her, they had seen her seeing them, and they wanted—god only knows what they wanted—and that was when Sickness had crawled out of her, when she’d coughed up her own nightmare and set it loose on the world.

Sickness is, she thinks, some Freudian half memory of childhood fears—the knife she cut herself on when she was five, the spiders she always had to kill, the creepy doll that her father brought home for her and was _so_ proud that he could afford it, so proud that she couldn’t bring herself to throw it away. Sickness was the terror that had grown fat and crouching in her belly until the moment finally came to escape.

When it was over, Devi put on her coat and stumbled into the church, and couldn’t even make it past the altar before she broke down trembling on the steps. Father, she’d said, I killed something. Something terrible.

Two years ago, Devi moved into the apartment above the church. Two years ago she started slicking back her hair the way the butch girls did down in Harlem, and two years ago she stopped sleeping at night.

She’d shown Sickness to Tenna, and then Tenna had believed.

 

* * *

 

In the dark street, a few blocks down from the church, Tenna passes out soft black sashes with the eyes cut out, like the Mark of Zorro. Jimmy fucking loves that movie.

“Obviously it’s a small neighborhood,” she says, as she snaps hers tight around the back of her head, “so you can’t be totally anonymous, but the funny thing about masks is that when you’re wearing one, people don’t tend to notice much else about you.”

“Why do you need these dumbass things?” Jimmy asks, as he immediately ties his on. He wants a sword so bad. He would look so killer with a sword.

“We break into a lot of places,” Devi says, holding hers between two fingers like it’s a wet rag. “Better not to accumulate too many eyewitnesses.”

“People oughta be thanking you,” Jimmy says, scowling back in the direction they’d come. “You’re out here kicking ass every night for god and country or whatever, like a couple of superheros.”

Tenna and Devi share a look. It irritates the fuck out of him.

“I mean,” he says, “what if you just let these eldritch fuckers wander around Manhattan? People’d lose their _shit_.”

Devi pulls on her mask. “You’re gonna get old waiting for people to be grateful,” she says. Then she turns to Edgar, who has his mask all twisted up in his hands. “Here,” she sighs, “hand it over.”

Jimmy just stands there, seething, while Devi knots the thing behind Edgar’s ears with a series of efficient jerks. Does she really need to touch him like that.

“Why weren’t you wearing these in the alley today?” Edgar asks. It’s a good question. It punctures some of the restless irritable energy in Jimmy’s gut to see Edgar is still on his guard.

“We were just on our way to the corner store,” Devi says. There’s a grimness in the way she says it that makes Jimmy think she’s worried. “We don’t usually go monster hunting during the day. Too many people out.”

“Just got a little work in on the side,” Tenna says, brightly.

 Devi’s frown deepens. “There’s more of them. They’re getting worse.”

Tenna rolls her eyes and starts off down the street, a candle flicker floating above her head. “You’re just paranoid,” she says. She meets Jimmy’s eye and winks, where Devi can’t see it. “Has been ever since she met Cucuy.”

 

* * *

 

Two years ago, Devi had shown Sickness to Tenna, and Tenna had sat down, in the room above the church, and said, “Alrighty. Well here’s what I can do.”

They’d been friends for a few years, since the night that Tenna walked into her brother’s restaurant and saw Devi furiously washing dishes alone in a nice dress, and had rolled up her sleeves to help.

The fire thing hadn’t started out as much. A couple scorch marks on the carpet. A couple singed bills. For a while Tenna thought everyone could do that, and so she hadn’t bothered to mention it. Then she’d known better, and kept it to herself.

It was her idea to fight fire with fire.

“So you know you can hurt them,” she said, inspecting the glittering blades that curved down from the little doll’s belly. They twitched when she got too close, like they were attracted to her.

“I guess,” Devi said, arms around her knees. She’d been pale and exhausted for weeks, but now the energy was right out of her, and she slumped like an empty sack. Tenna had hated the darkness for taking Devi away from her, and now she hated the things that lived within it for making Devi sag like that, a corpse of what she had been.

Tenna looked up. “So _hurt_ them,” she said.

 

* * *

 

Edgar brings the pack of borrowed cards with him, for something to do with his hands. They make him feel prepared, although for what he has no earthy idea. He’s decided to give up on being miserable and afraid. It just won’t cut it, he’d thought to himself in the dark of the church apartment, wringing your hands and sulking. What would your father say?

Even if he has no earthly idea what’s happening to him, he can still do something useful, by god.

He hopes.

As he shuffles the cards between his hands, Devi leads them down side street after side street, familiarity with the pattern in every smooth motion of her body. So far it’s just the usual darkness. Jimmy certainly seems to have taken to it, which maybe shouldn’t surprise him so much given that most of what Jimmy _does_ is on shady streets after midnight.

They pause at a branching back alley, foul smelling and cluttered with garbage. “Left or right?” Devi asks Tenna, and it sounds like it’s a well worn ritual, probably something they do every night, but for some reason Edgar opens up his mouth and says “Left.”

They turn to look back at him. He pauses in the middle of cutting his deck, the two of spades turned over in his hands. They look at each other. “Alright,” Devi says. “Left.”

At the next intersection, Devi doesn’t look back, but she says, “Left or right?”

And Edgar says, “Left.”

In the courtyard of a fairly nice restaurant, they pause between two potted trees and eye the dead end ahead of them. Edgar can feel everyone looking at him, although Devi is staunchly facing the dead end before them and Tenna is pretending not to. Jimmy’s looking right at him, but he doesn’t seem disappointed. He just seems like he’s waiting.

Edgar looks down at his deck.

He doesn’t know if it’s the deck that does it. He had a different set back home, when he played with Johnny, and it at least _seemed_ to be the same effect working back then. Theoretically, the common factor should be _him._ Jimmy said everyone has some trick they can do. This must be his. But if that’s true, then why are they in a dead end courtyard?

The cards thrum from one palm to the other. It’s noise like a purr, and then all of a sudden it _is_ a purr—or something like it. He slams the deck closed in his hands. He looks up, into the thrumming darkness, and he sees—

Black eyes—the endless abyss between stars—the iceless cold, the yawning emptiness, the dark, the dark, the dark—

“Tenna!” Devi shouts, and the courtyard erupts into red, scorching light.

 

* * *

 

It’s times like these that Jimmy is _so_ glad he doesn’t behave himself. He rips free the kitchen knife that he, yes, stole out of Devi’s apartment, and feels the air crackle around him.

When he looks up into those dozens and dozens of unblinking black eyes, what he sees are a constellation of little grinning targets. He doesn’t know if it’s all one big thing or an army of little things, and honestly he doesn’t care. His heart is thumping. His veins are burning. This is what he wants to do—this is what he’s always wanted to do, he just didn’t know that he could, that _anyone_ could—

In that moment between Devi’s shout and Tenna’s fireball, Jimmy forgets all about his greedy family waiting to swallow him down like another delicious corporate merger, about his sister’s smoking angry specter, about the lipstick marks he’s never been able to scrub from his skin, about the boys at the boarding school and the girls at the colleges and the marriages and the honeymoons, and he just. _Is_.

In the glow of the rocket firelight Jimmy sees rodent faces, grinning inhuman alien teeth, boiling whips of jointless limbs. All of it explodes into steam and dripping rubber, and in the light of the explosion that freaky little doll of Devi’s is scrambling up through the trellises, as deadly and delicate as anything Jimmy has ever seen.

He dives into the monstrous ichor that’s oozing down from the roof, hacking and slashing at the slithering limbs. It steams with every stab, recoiling and whining under him, and he doesn’t care that his skin burns when he grabs it, he’s in too deep, standing on the precipice of that abyss he can never resist. He jams his hand up into the coils of it and it _scorches_ him it’s so cold, it burns and burns and burns but he can’t let go, he

There’s that lightning crackle in the air again, that telltale ozone hotness, the inward curve as one moment cleaves from another, and before he knows what he’s doing, he’s stepped back through the

He’s standing several feet from himself, behind Tenna as she hurls blazing rocket after blazing rocket into the distended stomach of what might be a single thousand-eyed creature, and he has just enough time to see the whip that snaps towards him but not enough time to do anything about it when something hard and solid hits his shoulder, like a lurching train, and throws him rolling across the brick.

He can feel the pavement crack as the whip buries itself in the ground, but he doesn’t see it, because he’s found himself looking up into Edgar’s wide-eyed face, and he can’t look away. Edgar’s hands are buried in his jacket. Jimmy feels dazed, thinks he probably hit his head on the ground in that fall, and maybe that explains why he can’t tear his eyes away, no matter how many terrible noises the thing clinging to the roof makes. Distantly, he feels the ozone crackle of his past self pulling a burning black limb after him into the space between two moments. Then he's gone.

“I can’t feel my hand,” he says, like an idiot.

Edgar startles—he realizes belatedly that Edgar was staring back at him, too, this whole time. The older man fumbles around for Jimmy’s hand and carefully lifts it, and Jimmy thinks of brown gentle palms, like wrens, familiar and unfamiliar. He can’t feel his own skin, so instead he tries to remember what it felt like before, when he was young.

Edgar swears. “You look like you’ve been flayed,” he says. “God, I think this is just muscle.”

Jimmy squints down at it. “Nah,” he says, “there’s skin and stuff. I’m fine.”

“The hell you are,” Edgar says, and it’s the first time Jimmy’s ever heard his voice do that. His stomach does a bunch of weird flips.

He manages to break away for long enough to hear that Tenna and Devi are wrapping up, over by the trellises. They seem like they’ve got it under control. Jimmy lets his head fall back against the brick. Ouch.

He’s starting to feel stupid and down the way he always does after he’s fucked some girl into the mattress, like a grimy film is settling over his guts and everything is a little uglier than it was before. He tries to hold onto the dazed, fluttery feeling of Edgar looking down at him, but he can’t chase it back. Edgar is distracted now, looking away from him, his eyes fixed on something above them. Jimmy scowls and reluctantly follows the line of his eyes. It’s the roof over the dead end that he’s looking at, the brownstone black against the moon.

“There’s something,” Edgar starts to say, but before he can say what Jimmy is thinking—another monster, another fight, can he even get up?—the depth of shadow shifts, and they both realize it’s a person. Or something like a person.

Tenna looks over. She looks up.

“ _Cucuy_ ,” she says, and it almost sounds like a growl.

The figure on the roof lifts out of its crouch, and as easy and casual as a stroll through town, steps off the roof.

It’s a five story fall onto brick and Jimmy’s first thought is _suicide_. He doesn’t know what to think about that. On the one hand, it’s not his problem. On the other hand, like, what the fuck dude. They’re trying to have a monster battle here.

And then the figure sits right up, raises an arm, and says, “I’m fine, I broke my spine, it’s fine though.”

He rights himself effortlessly, brushing dust off his long coat. He doesn’t even seem bruised. There’s something about him that makes Jimmy uneasy, something familiar and wrong, something out of place. He whistles. “Boy, you sure fucked that guy up,” he says, rocking back on his heels as he peers up at the scorched roof.

The moon flickers out behind smog, and a scythe of light falls over his face. It clicks.

“ _Carson?_ ” Jimmy says, dumbfounded.

The tails of his coat flap as he spins around. “I’m sorry,” he says, “who?”

He says it brightly, head tilted, waiting like a cat for some interesting rodent to give the expected wriggle.

“Fuck off, Cucuy,” Devi says, pushing her dress over her hip. Her pistol glints in the darkness. “We’ve got it handled.”

“Mhm,” probably-Johnny says, nodding along. “You sure do. Looks like you’ve been recruiting too! Just in time, seems like.”

He turns his attention to Jimmy and Edgar, cat-elegant and skeleton uncanny. It’s got to be him. There’s no one else who can move like that. Jimmy does the math in his head, as best as he can. Johnny can’t be much older than Edgar, if that much. He should be in grade school right now, not picking his way through shattered brick to peer down at Jimmy like an interested vulture.

“You know they’re getting worse,” he says, looking at Jimmy but clearly talking to Devi.

“So what,” she says. Her fingers hover over the holster at her thigh.

“You may shoot me if you like,” he says. He hasn’t looked at her once. “If it makes you feel better. Would you like to get it out of your system?”

“Maybe,” she says, dangerously.

“The boss wants me to talk to you about a merger,” he says, this time definitely talking to Edgar and Jimmy. From the way Tenna and Devi tighten up, they’ve heard this pitch before. “These are dangerous times, you know. You do know, don’t you? Why else would you be out at three in the morning, chasing down spookums with—” he glances down at Jimmy’s forgotten knife, “—kitchenware.”

Johnny reaches down and plucks the knife right out of his limp hand. So far Jimmy’s been feeling a mixture of confusion and consternation (and maybe arousal, a little bit, there when Johnny leaned down over him like that) thick enough to completely gum up any reaction he might have had. The look on Johnny’s face, though, and taking his weapon, the little patronizing tick? Anger pops all of it like a hot needle through skin.

“I didn’t see _you_ doing anything useful,” Jimmy snarls.

“I just got here,” Johnny shrugs. “You found them faster than usual. Maybe,” he gives them both interested looks, black eyes glittering, “one of your new team mates? Maybe a Cassandra walks among us, eh?”

For the first time in this conversation, Edgar moves. It’s just a little shift, but when he sits back on his heels he seems a lot more solid, a lot more sure of himself. Jimmy scrambles to sit up too.

"What do you mean by a merger?" Edgar asks, even-toned and, damn, he lives with Johnny doesn't he? This has got to be weird for him. Jimmy is thinking fast now, but if Edgar blows their cover he's not sure what he's gonna do. He's never tried to juggle a paradox before. For all he knows, they could drop the wrong name and literally disappear from existence. Christ, this is why he doesn't usually fuck around with causality.

"We all have the same enemy here," Johnny says. "Your side, my side. As much as I admire the midnight torch society here, a little slash and burn isn't going to solve our problems indefinitely."

"We're doing just fine," Tenna says. "We've _been_ doing just fine."

Johnny just shakes his head. "No you're not. You're losing ground," he says. "Devi here knows it. Don't you, Devi?"

Devi doesn't say anything. The air smells like smoke and something chemical, something that makes Jimmy think of the drugs he's done in the dark burrow of a week-long trip, when you get in so deep that you can't tell one thing from another but you still _smell_ it, and you know it, and you want it. When those rubbery bits boil, what do they boil up into, anyway?

"It's getting thinner," Johnny says. When he moves like that, Jimmy can see the long knife--or short sword--under his unseasonable coat. "Pretty soon they'll be pouring through day and night, too fast for you to keep up with on your little part time crusade. You need firepower. You need--"

He looks up. In the moonlight, like something pouring out in white ink, he draws the knife from his side and spins on his heel. At first it seems like he's looking at something on the brick, but then, no, Jimmy realizes what he's missed. There are no bricks. The big brownstone wall, black against the sky, starts to bulge and writhe.

The whole length of it blinks open into a thousand little eyes.

Jimmy can feel the thickness in the air now--he's picking it up faster and faster, each time he stands in the wake of these massive fuckers. His skin crackles with ozone, and now he's sure that it's not just his heart pumping adrenaline into his arteries. It's the space between moments, but it's refracted endlessly, a shattered mirror with a hundred cracks. He's dimly aware of Tenna and Devi behind him, glowing with fresh firelight, dimly aware of Edgar beside him freezing solid, barely breathing. He reaches out. He pushes apart a moment and steps through into ( _cold-black-empty-the dark-the-dark-thedark_ ) thirty seconds in the future, beside Johnny, who is just starting to turn and look at him when he takes the kitchen knife back from his hands and tosses it--

\--Back to himself, as he slips through another moment and returns to Edgar's side, catching the blade a moment later. The curve of the metal bites into his fucked up hand, but he doesn't feel it, he doesn't feel _anything_ , except his deafening blood hot in his ears and the crackle of ozone on his skin.

A tendril of black horror whips down onto the brick, and brick dust blows in clouds under it. This is what they fucking mean when they talk about _bloodlust_ , and it is raw and heavy and it fills him up like nothing has ever filled him up. He wants to destroy something beautiful.

He's so focused on what he knows is coming next that he almost pukes in alarm when he's spun right off his feet and torn out of the fight. He's being dragged through the courtyard, past the scorched back of the restaurant and the shattered trellises and into the street, where it's cold and weirdly quiet. Edgar has him by the wrist.

"What the _fuck_ Edgar!" he says, struggling to take his arm back. Edgar must be just as lit up with adrenaline as he is though, because his grip might as well be iron.

"We are not equipped to fight that," Edgar says. "You're going to get yourself killed if you try to fight that thing with a kitchen knife."

"You can go fuck yourself!" Jimmy says, wrenching free _finally._ "I had it under control! Did you not _see_ me back there? I'm hell on wheels!"

"Are you _insane?_ " Edgar demands, starting to sound truly worked up. "We need to get out of this place right now!"

"You wanna leave those assholes alone with Gog and Magog over there? It's gonna eat them alive!"

Edgar reaches out and actually shakes him, hands whiteknuckling Jimmy's biceps. "It's going to eat _you_ alive!" he says. "You're a rich teenage drunk and I'm a _driver_ , this is _above our paygrade!_ Both of us!"

Jimmy makes a noise in the back of his throat that almost hurts him, it's so raw. Edgar lets go of him immediately, snapping his hands back for a moment before reaching into his pockets, expression grim. "Take us home," he says. "You've clearly got your power back under control."

"I don't know _how_ to get us back home," Jimmy snarls. "It's a fucking twenty year jump, and I don't even know how we got here in the first place."

Edgar comes up from his pockets with a playing card. It's not one of Devi's yellowed antique cards. It's a slick black ace of spades, part of a bicycle pack that won't be printed for at least another decade. Edgar's got his stupid _serious_ face on, lips forming a deep dark line as he presses the card into Jimmy's resisting hand.

"Take us home," he says. And when he's holding it like that, his fingers touching Jimmy's fingers, finally Jimmy can feel the shape of the thing that runs through Edgar, the same way that he can feel the space that cleaves time open all around them. Edgar knows where things _belong_. The card wants to be part of a deck. Their moment wants to return to the reality they've been unshuffled from. And all of this would probably be real neat or whatever, except that Jimmy keeps looking at Edgar's fingers touching his fingers and he thinks he's still angry as hell but also, like, why is his whole body vibrating.

The air isn't as thick here as it was in the courtyard--if he listens he can hear something heavy shattering on the other side of the building, even now--but now, holding Edgar's hand, standing on the edge of that eldritch middle place, he can just smell the space where a moment is cleaving open, all around them. There's potential here. He knows that all he has to do is push, and he can follow the shape--that he can borrow Edgar's quiet certainty--and step back through to where they belong.

Edgar is looking at him. His expression is softening, his frown is turning into something that almost hurts Jimmy to look at. "Mas-" he starts to say, and then he shakes his head and he says, "Jimmy, come on."

There's something beautiful and terrifying on the other side of that courtyard and Jimmy wants to _destroy it_ , he wants to bury himself in that cold burning abyss and become nothing, become a set of hands and the shape of a knife, he wants to sear the lipstick marks from his skin and the smoke from his clothes and be lost forever.

Edgar clutches his hand tighter, and he says, "Jimmy. Please." 

And so Jimmy pushes them through the darkness and the void and into a night which smells like wisteria and summer.


	3. Moonlight in Vermont

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahh, another chapter goes by, and still, I don't get to write Tenna or Devi! My girls! Next time, though, next time for sure. There's actual shipping stuff in this one, though, unlike my Failed Project Chapter One where they just kind of, like, look at each other? THIS IS THAT HARDCORE UST SHIT. WE IN IT NOW.
> 
> Chapter four will probably be up in like, two days, 'cause Dez writes like a monster. AND I'LL SEE Y'ALL IN TWO MONTHS! Later, nerds!

 

_And don’t forget the lilac bush,_  
_Bright in the morning air -_  
_Remember, always remember_  
_Remember that I care._  
— The Ballad of Rose Marraunt

When they step out into the garden, Edgar is so close (such gentle, rough hands, touching his, touching - ) that Jimmy kind of figures he’s about to lean in for a kiss, which pisses him off because, what was this, some fucking romp in the rose bushes or something? But instead, he turns away without a second glance to look over the gardenias and up toward the moon, and those soft, strong hands fall away from his, too, like touching him was nothing, and that _infuriates_ him.

“Hey,” Edgar says, “it’s _Moonlight in Vermont._ We’re - “

“What the _fuck_ is your problem?” Jimmy snaps. His hand _hurts_ in Edgar’s absence, and why doesn’t he _get_ that, how could he just _let go_ like it means nothing to him -

When he was little, real little, no bigger than four, Arturo had showed him a bird’s nest they’d pulled from the garage rafters, let him touch the blue eggs. He’d wanted to hold one - he hadn’t realized the shell was so fragile -

And Edgar is staring at him now, lips parted and brow furrowed like he wants to yell but his voice is too soft, so soft and he

\- cried when it broke, because he didn’t mean to, he’d only wanted to look and it was all wrong, and he’d never killed anything -

“Don’t you get it?” Edgar says, “I remember that song from last night - er - the night we left, that is. We can still fix this, but we need to move. Come on. Do you know the way out?”

The anger should be helping him, it always has before, but the blood pumping in his ears is disorienting, and it was such a _massive jump_ and he can still feel the chill from that ice cold vacuum watching him in his skin, and his hand fucking _hurts_ doesn’t he _get_ it, and he can feel the brick dust from 1938 in his lungs, and his stomach

\- had settled, in the midst of his agony, as Arturo had taken him by the shoulders and hushed him - not to quiet his inconvenient pain, but to calm his hammering heart. Soft fingers stroking his hair, soft voice speaking words he couldn’t understand, soft winds whistling harmonies above him with the birdsong -

“Hey, hey,” Edgar says, but it’s so much softer, all the hurry and distress absent and his hands are on Jimmy’s shoulders, and all the pain is gone. He’s so close - “it’s okay, just breathe, you’re okay,” - he can smell the sweat and cigarettes and Devi’s apartment and petrol (always the petrol, knees slick with vaseline and mecurochrome in the summers, and Jimmy had followed on the tails of that scent when he was too stupid to know better) off his clothes, and all he wants to do is lean

\- into Arturo’s shirt and gasped, like he was trying to breathe in the ugly stench of automobiles (like the oily rainbows in the slick water of the garage), and listened to his beating heart -

\- his throat burns, and the stench of bile drags him back, cold sweat on his forehead, warm hands on his back. With the croon of a trumpet spitting out a solo up at the house, he reevaluates the situation, and finds (to a burn of humiliation up his neck) that the only reason Edgar’s arms are around him is because he keeled over and vomited. He jerks himself away and stumbles quickly to his feet with a curt “fine, ‘m fuckin’ fine”, brushing off the sleeves of his jacket like Vargas left some invisible residue on him.

“Are you…” Vargas looks up at him, his glasses pushed up over his forehead, kneeling unsteadily, and if Jimmy was feeling better about this situation he’d have about twelve dozen comments to make about _that_ , but the tension is coiling in his stomach like a snake dozing in the grass - calm for now, but quick to strike should anything happen. “Are you okay?”

Jimmy ignores his question - if nothing else, it embarrasses him, and anyway, he’s got other things on his mind. “We shouldn’t have left,” he says avoiding Edgar’s gaze, “they needed us.”

There’s a pause, and then Edgar gives this soft, exhausted sigh and gets to his feet. Jimmy doesn’t offer him a hand up.

“Look,” he says after a minute, “you don’t have to help me. Okay? Just point me the way out. _You_ can go back, if you want.” No response. Jimmy can hear the gentle _fwip fwip_ of a playing card being bent nervously back and forth. “Jimmy, please. Would you just - “ he breaks off, sighs. “Fine. Don’t help. I’ll find my way out on my own.”

“I’m the one that wanted to _help,_ ” Jimmy says, if only to stop Edgar from leaving, and turns around. He feels very childish, fists balled at his side and feet stomping in the mud, and he closes his eyes, breathes in, and lets the anger pump through him. His sister, the beast, that condescending voice leaning over him - it’s easy to be angry. All he has to do is let go - let go -

His body relaxes just as Edgar speaks again. “I’m sorry,” he says, and he even _sounds_ sorry, and what the fuck has he even got to apologize for? Fuck, _now_ Jimmy feels like a heel. “I’m not like you. I can’t - “ he breaks off, staring disconsolately over the bushes. Up towards the house, a woman starts singing words that he can't quite make out.

“Don’t apologize to me. Shit. You’re a weird goddamn guy, you know that?” Self-consciously, he rubs the back of his neck with the palm of his hand. “Come on, I used to run around here all the time as a kid. You have to go out this way to get to the garage in anything resembling good time, otherwise you have to walk all the way around the garden and the greenhouse, and it takes ages. Fuck that.”

“Oh,” Edgar says, and falls into step behind him. There’s an uncomfortably long silence as they navigate their way around flower beds and intimidatingly tall rose bushes, before “so…you…know the fastest way to the garage from here,” he says, “is that…I mean, should I take that a certain way?”

“I live here, Vargas.”

“Well, sure,” he says, almost backing off - but there’s something in his tone now, and it reminds Jimmy of his body laying a little too close, warm and human in the dark. He shivers, even in his jacket, even in the summer. “But I grew up here, and I don’t even know which garden that _is_. I mean, do you know the fastest way to the tennis court from here?”

“Which one?”

“Whichever. Indoor.”

“Uh, no.”

“Outdoor?”

“Nnnope.”

Edgar raises an eyebrow at him, and Jimmy realizes he’s come abreast, as fast or faster now that they’re off the narrow gravel pathways of the garden and on the wide, almost paved trails that crisscross over the grounds. The car’s gone - or, more accurately, it’s not here yet, and if they’re going to fix Edgar’s life, they don’t have time to wait. “If you didn’t know either way, why even bother asking?”

“Maybe I just love wasting your time. Look, man, it’s not ‘significant’, okay? My car’s in the garage. Carson lives up there, too.” He pauses. They haven’t discussed Carson yet. From the grimace on his companion’s face, he’s not looking forward to it, either.

“Do you think that was really him?” Edgar asks after a moment. The hand holding the ace of spades slides into his pocket.

“Had to be,” Jimmy says. “No one else moves like that.”

“He didn’t recognize us. Do you think that’ll cause a - a paradox, or something?”

Jimmy shrugs. Honestly, he’s not really sure how most of this works. He’s not sure they’ll even find Carson working in the household, if their presence in the past changed anything significantly. He hopes not. Where is he gonna get a valet who quotes Kafka at him and cries about how rude young people are? Another one, anyway.

He looks down at his hand. The bleeding’s stopped and everything is all kind of scabbed over, healing absurdly fast - maybe that’s something about how the bimbees or whatever attack, who knows - but it still looks super fucked up. He pats his pockets for the lump of discarded gloves, and finds, to some dismay, that he must have left them in ’38. Or, fuck, maybe in his room with Whatshername the Yellow. That’s going to be hard to explain.

“Shit,” he says aloud, “that’s gonna be hard to explain.”

Edgar looks over at him - subtly at first, from the corner of his eye, then jerking his head in sudden recognition. “Are you okay? I mean - is your hand okay?”

“It doesn’t hurt,” he lies, “it just looks super fucked up. It’s healing way faster than it should, but I don’t know where my gloves are. Probably left them somewhere stupid - shit.”

Edgar considers him for a moment longer than necessary, then reaches into his pocket and pulls out a pair of black leather gloves. “Here,” he says, handing one to Jimmy, “you can bring it back later. Just...go see someone about that, alright?”

Jimmy takes the glove and fits it over his ragged hand without a moment of hesitation. The leather is worn, but cared for, bent at the inside of the knuckles but soft and smooth over the back of the hand, and it squeaks as he bends his fingers in it experimentally. It’s warm with residual heat from Edgar’s pocket, where it was pressing against his thigh. He decides not to think about this right now. “That’ll work,” he says, because gratitude doesn’t come to him easily. Edgar makes a noncommittal humming noise, which makes Jimmy feel unimportant, which makes him feel irritable.

They fall into silence again, gravel crunching under their feet.

“How’d you know exactly when we were? I mean,” Jimmy says, “you knew it was before shit went down, and that song had something to do with it, but I mean - how’d you even remember this song playing?” He considers editorializing a little bit, too, but internalizes it. It’s just - maybe if it was _Too Damn Hot_ playing or something, that’d be worth remembering. But _Moonlight in Vermont_ is so - it’s so _nothing._ It’s not bad, exactly, just desperately boring. Too slow to dance to. It doesn’t even rhyme.

Edgar shrugs. “My mom liked it,” he says, “when I got older, and she was coming home from the end of a party - whenever she got off shift, I guess, she’d request it on her way out. So when I heard it, I knew she was on her way home.”

“Oh,” Jimmy says, and bites his tongue as the garage rises from the horizon ahead of them. “Uh - you know what you’re doing?”

“Um, yes? I think?” Edgar sighs. “I really hope this works. What are you going to do?”

Jimmy shrugs, glances at the wrought iron spiral staircase leading up to the rooms above the garage. “Oh, I dunno,” he says, thinking of even breaths skirting over his ear in 1938, “maybe I’ll fix some shit with my sister.”

 

_Evening summer breeze…sweet warbling of the meadowlark…[Moonlight in Vermont](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyyRi3l7E_k)…_

Tess stands in the smoking room, hip cocked, pretending to listen to Admiral Tourt’s boy tell her about his “great idea” for a sugar-cane based plastic. She’s heard about twenty-seven “great ideas” in the past hour, and it’s starting to chafe - well, more than it usually does. It stinks like Camels and Turkish cigarettes in here, like young men trying to imitate their fathers. Waste of good air - _she_ had never been ridiculous enough to smoke _Turkish_ cigarettes.

_She had always smoked Lucky Strikes…_

“Well, I shall certainly take it into consideration,” she feels herself saying, “why don’t you speak to my secretary, and she’ll see if there’s not a meeting she can set up.” And she watches him deflate - so he’s been in the business long enough to hear the refusal in that. Good. Saves her secretary the time. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I need to step outside for a moment…”

“Oh, but if you’ll just - “ he says, and catches her by the wrist, “maybe there’s some…other agreement we could come to?” And he twists his neck slightly, so his jaw catches the light handsomely. Oh, christ. Tess represses the urge to roll her eyes - he can’t be much older than twenty-two, if he thinks _that_ move is going to catch him anything but trouble.

She could strike him upside the head, but he is young, and stupid, and she takes pity. “Mister Tourt,” she says, and pries his hand off of her with the exacting touch of a fisherman removing a worm’s carcass from a hook, “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, but I’m glad you’ve gotten it out of your system. Now, I’m going to take some air. Alone. I wish you luck on your future endeavors.”

And she turns to go -

“Has anyone seen Gretchen?” Says her mother, and Tess frowns. If Mrs. McArthur is enough distressed to appear in the smoking room -

“Let’s step outside,” Tess says, not unkindly, and guides the woman through the door with one hand while stubbing her Craven out in the ashtray with the other. The fresh, temperate air envelops her, floods her with music. She coughs. “Now, where did you last see her?”

Mrs. McArthur is a woman of mature, refined taste, only a little younger than Tess’ mother and dressed as though the spring of 1915 never ended. She wrings her hands, shifting nervously. “Well,” she says, “I last saw her dancing with your brother, but that was almost two hours ago, and no one’s seen her since - and I know nothing really bad has happened, and Gretchen _is_ an adult, after all - but she drove me here, and she has the keys to my car,” she says, and takes what she probably thinks is a subtle gasp of air. Tess, who has heard this story at every single party from different concerned mothers since the summer after Jimmy’s graduation, stifles an exhausted (and, frankly, disappointed) yawn. “So if I can’t find her, I can’t get home.”

“Please don’t distress yourself any further, Mrs. McArthur,” she says, smiling and touching the older woman’s shoulder, “we’ll find your car. And your…daughter…”

She trails off, squinting. On the edge of her vision, cutting through the dim light on the edges of the courtyard, comes her brother, from a decidedly non-bedroom-worthy direction. His suit looks as though he’s slept in it, but not in that testosterone-fueled, unchivalrously disheveled way it usually does by eleven in the evening. Has he been napping in the garden?

More importantly, is her standard for his behavior - is the bar _so low_ \- that she feels a touch of _pride_ to know he hasn’t been up someone’s skirts all night?

Mrs. McArthur follows her gaze, and catches the end of her line of sight at about the time Jimmy vaults over the hip wall at the edge of the indented floor, looking less like a shadow of flesh and more like a good-natured, rumpled kid. “Jimmy,” says Tess, and she waves him over uncertainly.

Despite looking bored and worn out, Jimmy actually approaches. “Oh boy,” he says, his face a mask of painful indifference, “am I in trouble again?”

“Not unless you’ve done something wrong,” Tess says, “this is Mrs. McArthur, she’s looking for her daughter. Have you seen her anywhere?”

Jimmy has never been a tremendous actor or liar - he’s gotten the hang of denying everything on principle, and sometimes it even fools dad, but it’s never fooled Tess. Which is why his look of complete benign non-recognition so thoroughly seals the deal. “Uh…I, uh, must have? At some…point?” He glances to Mrs. McArthur helplessly.

“Gretchen,” Tess prompts, “you were dancing with her about two hours ago?”

“Yeah, I danced with a lot of girls,” he says, clicking back into his typical rhythm, “it’s called being a good host? Getting wallflowers into circulation? Try it sometime.”

Tess raises her eyebrow at him, and he stares resolutely back. “Watch your tone,” she says, because it feels like the right thing _to_ say, but there’s no bite in it. “Well, we’ll keep an eye out, and I can retrieve the car shortly to drive you home, Mrs. McArthur. Jimmy, could I speak with you for a moment?”

Left to her own devices, Mrs. McArthur quickly migrates into a conversation about the stock market exchange after the financial crisis, and Tess takes her brother by the shoulder and guides him quietly into the house. He eyes her anxiously. “What’s…happening,” he says, “are you mad or not?”

“I’m not sure, but I think I’m proud of you,” she replies, and smiles. “Where have you been? Did you fall asleep in a flowerbed or something? There’s dirt all over your jacket. Are you wearing _one glove?_ ”

“Proud?”

Her brother looks like he’s been slapped gently with a wriggling fish - there’s no obvious injury in his eyes, but the confusion marries the shock nicely. “I was all set to give you a lecture,” she tells him, reaching for the pack of cigarettes in her pocket, “no one’s seen you since - well. I just figured you were off in the house somewhere.”

“Fucking some bitch.”

“If you’d like.” She leans in and lets him light her Craven instinctively. “Honestly, I’m much happier to know you were - what, starting a fashion trend? Rolling around in the dirt?”

“I went down to the garage,” Jimmy says, narrowing his eyes. “Christ, Tess, you’re proud of _that_? The bar’s _never_ been lower, huh?”

“It really hasn’t. You’ve always been a hellion,” she admits, and reaches forward to brush what looks like debris off his shoulder pads affectionately. He rolls his eyes, but the tension in his torso melts away at her touch. There’s something familiar in it, something neither of them wants to look at too closely, in case it breaks in their hands.

She remembers being twenty-something, ushering him away from company and scrubbing dirt off his cheeks with spit on a handkerchief. And her mother had sighed, because honestly, that’s what they had a nanny for -

“I’d better go get the key to the Ford,” she says, suddenly, “I guess Gretchen’s off with _someone_ , and I can’t stand having her mother down my neck all night.”

Something flashes over her brother’s face that she can’t identify, and then he says, “don’t worry about it, I’ll take her. Need some air, anyway.”

“You sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. Be back before you know it.” He claps her on the shoulder and drips past her, streaming like water in the brook back through the door and out into the night, hands in his pockets, never a glance back at her.

She watches him go. She coughs.

 

———————————

Everything that Edgar knows about time travel, he’s learned from Jimmy in the past twenty-four hours of his life. The sum of Jimmy’s total knowledge about time travel, by the way, being exactly fucking zero, due to a critical lack of experimentation or effort and a frankly insane level of luck. Which means Edgar knows _maaaybe_ three things about time travel?

For example, no one (read: Jimmy) told him about the Law of Redundancy (as Johnny calls it), the universe’s special way of keeping paradoxes from ruining everyone’s day. In layman’s terms (since Edgar doesn’t really understand the technical aspects of it, anyway), sending yourself back in time to before you sent yourself back in time means there are two versions of _you_ \- the one that went back in time, and the one that hasn’t, yet, but exists simultaneously. This is messy, for a number of reasons, and apparently, the universe’s handwave is just to kill one of the yous hanging around.

“Specifically, it’s the one who was in the timeline before you went back,” Johnny explains, pouring tea into the mug Edgar is gripping by the handle so hard his knuckles have gone white. “It’s called a doomed timeline, I think. How are you feeling?”

Edgar’s eyes are fixed on his own corpse, lying in the kitchen. “Do I have to answer?” He hisses through gritted teeth. “What are we going to _do?_ ”

Johnny shrugs. “Nothing,” he says, “it’ll evaporate soon enough. Look, the Redundancy is there to help us. Well, to help _Jimmy_.” His eyes are distant, his expression glazed. His jaw is working under the surface, like he’s trying to break something in his mouth apart using only his tongue. “Edgar,” he says, voice not quite right, “it’s going to be okay.”

"I just - I just wanted to explain - "

"I know."

"He just..." They stare at where he fell. "I should...move him, right?"

 

———————————

As the party is quieting down, Tess finishes a lovely conversation on the patio with Mrs. Sasha Gwish (mostly commiseration on their typical misfortune with progeny, though Tess has less to add than she normally does) and retrieves a flute of champagne from the bar. She watches her brother make his way back up the winding path from the garage, smiles, and steps through the glass doors into the foyer of the house.

And looks up. At the top of the main staircase, bumping down in his typical unfettered stride, is…her brother. His clothes are wrinkled, his tie knotted loose around his neck. There’s red lipstick staining his neck, his hand, the side of his face.

“Jimmy?” She says, squinting - then looks over her shoulder to see her brother drinking and laughing with another young man at the party. Then looks back at her brother standing at the top of the stairs.

“Aw, shit,” Jimmy says, squinting out into the courtyard.

Tess’ head swivels back and forth maybe three times. “James Reeds,” she says, focusing at last on the Jimmy halfway down, and begins to step towards the staircase menacingly, “you have ten seconds to explain what is going on.”

Jimmy opens his mouth to answer, but instead of words, he coughs and keels over. Something liquid and black pours out over his lips, staining his shirt, and he falls forward, hitting the stair below and tumbling all the way down to land at his sister’s feet -

And she yells something, maybe his name, all anger replaced by cold terror, and she runs to try and grab at him, falling to her knees - to pull him up and look at his face, check his pulse, _something-anything_ \- she yells to the nearest waiter to get help and he runs -

Her brother’s body goes cold in her arms, not just dimming warmth but an icy, frozen, black chill, like a heatless vacuum and endless blue-black hallways, burning at her flesh where she touches him - and, shuddering, he falls through her arms, no longer a body but black ash, streaming in every direction across the floor and coating her face and arms with soot.

“What’s going on?” He asks from behind her, and she turns her head to see him, tries to get to her feet - the ash is everywhere, a body out of shadow, she can practically smell the Lucky Strikes smoke - “Tess?”

Wordlessly, she walks to him and pulls him into an embrace, feels him tense under her, feels him place his hands on her shoulders like he’s trying to comfort her. “I’m sorry,” she says, “she’s here.”

And then she lets him go and walks past, leaving him watching the back of her head. She can’t do this right now. She needs to clean herself up.

 

———————————

Let’s rewind for a minute.

“Yo, Vargas, I think it worked, my sister - oh, what the fuck,” Jimmy says, striding through the door to the servant’s quarters with no prelude or warning. Johnny yelps like a startled dog, then tries very hard to look as though he hadn’t. “What is even - is that you?” He points an accusing finger at the corpse on the floor.

“I mean, yeah,” Edgar says, and hands his mug to Johnny (and like, does he _really_ have to do that, like, do they _need_ to be sharing a cup that they both put their _real human mouths_ on). “I came up to explain what was going on, and he yelled at me for two seconds and then just…keeled over and…” he gestures helplessly at the body.

“Huh,” Jimmy says, then snaps his fingers. “ _Ohhh._ Right, unstable time loop. There’s a, there’s, fuckin’, a redundancy clause or something. The universe is super lazy and arbitrary, right. I forgot.”

“You _forgot?_ ”

“Hey man, chill,” Jimmy says, because he has never in his life uttered an apology and just because Edgar looks like he’s trying to blow up Jimmy’s eyes with his mind does not mean he’s going to start, “it happens sometimes. This is why I don’t do this time travel shit that much, it’s way too easy to fuck up. I told you that.” In the dark, when he’d wanted to lean forward and take as much as he deserved from Edgar - to breathe him in and pull him close.

Edgar looks like he wants to argue - but he shakes his head and sighs, and takes the now-empty mug back from Johnny and stands up. “It’s alright,” he says after a minute, “we all make mistakes. Any advice on what to _do_ about the body?” As if to call the attention back to it, he steps meaningfully over his own dead arm and into the kitchen, to put the mug in the sink. Jimmy shrugs.

“It should like…evaporate, I think,” he says, scratching the back of his neck where the tag on his jacket is itching and trying not to think about the new dollop of red-hot anger blooming in his stomach every second Edgar is looking away from him. If he could think back to the last time he fucked this up, which was - fuck, what, his third honeymoon? Time is an unforgiving fucking mistress, damn - he might be able to remember some details, but it’s really hard to focus for some reason. Also, does Edgar _need_ to be washing that dish right now, they’re talking about super serious time shit, here. “Like…if someone outside the timestream touches it, or messes with it, it should just kinda…” he waves his hands vaguely. “Poof. Ash.”

“At which point, you just sweep it up,” Johnny adds, and Jimmy kind of startles because shit, he sort of forgot that guy was here. “It’s soot, but it doesn’t burn, scorch, or melt any of the surroundings. I’ve swept up enough of it.” He turns to scowl at the young master, who winks cheekily in return.

Edgar turns to look at them, and his eyes flicker quickly between the two. His face is completely unreadable. “Okay,” he says, after a few more seconds than necessary, “but I don’t understand. I already moved the - the - I already moved it, and nothing happened. It’s still…” he trails off and looks down. Jimmy follows his gaze and realizes the body’s eyes have been closed, and it’s been shifted to lay on its back.

“Yeah, ‘cause - you need someone who’s not involved, right,” Jimmy says, motioning vaguely with his hands again, “like…nothing’ll happen if you touch it or if I touch it, ‘cause we’re in the timestream, like - we’re the ones moving through time. But if, uh…” he gives a cursory glance around the room, settling his sights on the particularly distraught valet still sitting at the table by the window, “…if Johnny fucks with it,” he says, pointing, “it should, y’know. Dissolve. ‘Cause he didn’t come with us, it’s like - he’s part of this timeline, so…he can interact with it, I guess?” He shrugs. Time travel is hard.

Edgar and Johnny share a look. “It’s worth a shot,” Edgar says, and Johnny _’hrmph’s_ , but he stands up and brushes non-existent dirt from the front of his pants anyway.

“I’m only ever going to do this once,” he snaps, “and _only_ because Edgar’s a good person.” And yep, that’s Johnny, alright, hunched and scowling and sneering, moving through the room like a snake through the grass. But he’s also -

He bends over Edgar’s body, knees bent, and it’s exactly the way he curled his body over Jimmy’s not two hours before, back in 1938. He rests those spidery hands on the corpse’s face almost tenderly, pushing hair out of his eyes, and Jimmy would be pissed, but like. It’s kind of hot.

Jimmy catches a glance up at the living Edgar, just to see his face. He looks passive, except for his mouth, where his lips and teeth are barely parted by just a few centimeters, and Christ, what’s _that_ supposed to mean? As he watches, Edgar runs his tongue almost imperceptibly over his lower teeth, never quite touching his lip.

“Shit!” Johnny snatches his hands away with a curse as the body shudders, then blows to ash in every direction, springing to his feet with unsettling dexterity to avoid the worst of the black on his suit. Edgar startles back, snatched out of whatever reverie was consuming him and almost upsetting a pile of drying porcelain bowls. Jimmy, who’s more experienced in these matters, just looks down in dismay as his nice (if wrinkled) suit gets fucking blasted with Furthest-Ring-Time-Shenanigan Corpse Dust.

“Well, that’s the end of this shirt,” he says bleakly.

“Fuck! This really fucking hurts,” Johnny hisses, “fucking freezing! You’d think they’d get a better system. Who the fuck’s in charge of this?” He continues muttering to himself, gripping at his palms, burned by the cold.

Edgar makes a small noise from the back of his throat, less a sigh than it is a wheeze of escaping air. Jimmy takes a pause from dismally brushing ash off his white shirt to glance at him. “Is that…it?” He whispers after a second.

Johnny continues cursing, and Jimmy tunes him out with the ease of regular habit. “Should be,” he says, and strides through the soot to Edgar’s side, for the totally admirable reason of giving him a reassuring pat on the elbow, and definitely not to get a feel for his arms to see what kind of muscle this guy is working with, because his sleeves were rolled up a few hours ago and they were looking, you know, kinda nice. “You still doing good?”

He pushes his glasses onto the dome of his head, presses his palm into the side of his face. “I think I could use more tea,” he mumbles. “You do this often?”

“Once or twice.” He tips his head to the side. There’s a divot between Edgar’s eye and the side of his nose where his glasses normally rest, almost shining a pale grey-purple under the brown of his skin. “Uh, actually, I came down here to get a set of car keys,” he says, “I’m supposed to drive what’s-her-name home. To keep Tess from getting here first, uh…where do you…?”

“Oh - the, the cabinet over the stove,” Edgar says, and gestures vaguely. He glances down to where Jimmy’s hand is resting on his arm, and Jimmy realizes belatedly it’s the hand in the glove. “Hey, is that - did you get that fixed?”

“Uh, kinda,” Jimmy lies, then - because he feels kind of bad about keeping things from Edgar for some reason - amends, “which is to say, can you help me out? I bought myself some spare time, so…” he trails off.

“Me?” Edgar blinks at him. “I mean, we should have some cloth bandages - I thought you said you were going to go see someone about it, though - “

“Technically, _you_ said I _should_ see someone about it,” Jimmy says, helpfully. “And here I am, taking your advice. You should be flattered! I don’t take advice unless I absolutely have to. So?” Rather unnecessarily, he decides to pull the glove off with his teeth, more to see the look on Edgar’s face than anything else.

Edgar’s eyebrows raise and his jaw clenches, but his face is otherwise perfectly stoic. Jimmy figures maybe he knew Jimmy was going to do something like that - that’s his whole thing, right? Still, kind of sucks there’s no surprise there. “I wouldn’t call myself ‘somebody’,” he says quietly, “just sit down, I’ll be right back.”

He slips out of the room towards what Jimmy can only assume is the bathroom, and Jimmy, probably against his better judgement, sits down at the table by the window. Johnny, who until now has been bustling around with a kettle and the stove, pauses to give him a look. “What are you doing, Reeds?”

“Great question,” Jimmy replies, “wish I knew the answer. Now beat it.”

Johnny’s brow furrows and his lips contort into that patented upside-down V, the barest hint of disapproving teeth peeking out. “You’re not technically my employer,” he points out, “and I’m not going to ‘beat it’ in my own house.”

Jimmy snorts. “You _sure_ about that, bud? Guess that’d explain a lot.”

He pauses - considers - scowls harder than Jimmy thought was physically possible. “You miserable mistake of a juvenile delinquent,” he snaps, and fucks off just as Edgar comes back through the door, shaking his head and probably cursing.

“Uh,” Edgar says, roll of bandages in one hand and a bottle of something red-black in the other, “what was that?”

“Y’know, negotiations,” Jimmy shrugs, eyeing the bottle uncomfortably. “What’s that?”

“Mercurochrome,” He answers easily, sitting in the chair next to Jimmy’s and setting the bandages on the table, “I used to use it all the time as a kid. It hurts less than iodine, anyway. Here, give me your hand.”

Edgar is a fucking liar apparently, because Mercurochrome hurts like bitch and also stains Jimmy’s whole hand a bright orange-red everywhere it touches, which freaks him the fuck out for a second before he remembers iodine does the same shit, but with brown. He’d be cursing up a storm, but some part of him is kind of worried about like, looking like a stupid kid in front of Edgar? Which is stupid because…well, he’s _always_ looked like a stupid kid in front of Edgar.

“Sorry,” Edgar murmurs, “how are you holding up?”

“’S fine,” Jimmy lies for, fuck, like the twentieth time tonight, “you almost done?”

“Yeah. Pass me the roll?”

It occurs to Jimmy that though Edgar’s hands are large, they’re rotating on wrists so thin he can practically see the dent of bone dipping between those two, uh, lumpier bones. The ones on the wrists. Anatomy was never really his forte, and even if it had been, it’s really hard to focus on anything academic when long, tapered fingers are unwinding cloth off a roll and gently wrapping it around his hand. The skin on the back of his hands looks so dry, cracking and scabbing in places, but his nails are clean, his cuticles pushed back with a consistency that only comes from attention to detail.

The air feels weird between them. Without teeth gritted in pain, Jimmy has nothing to distract him from how quiet it is, how focused Edgar is on his hand. He can just barely make out the sound of a trumpet player going wild on a solo line from all the way back at the house, and much closer, his own heartbeat pumping blood into his ears.

Behind those slipping glasses, Edgar has dark eyes and long eyelashes, the kind most women would kill for and which he definitely doesn’t appreciate.

It’s so quiet. One of them has to say something. Edgar’s fingers are working their way between Jimmy’s, and it’s desperately intimate but _no one’s saying anything_ and it’s too close, Jimmy can feel his heart in his throat, but it’s not grimy and scabbing on him like it normally does - and he opens his mouth to say something dumb -

“You’re not nobody,” he says, and Edgar looks up, startled.

“What?”

“You said you weren’t anybody earlier,” he says, feeling like he should be making a joke or something, but the words just keep coming out earnest, no matter what he tries, “that’s not true. Our family’s fucked up, but it needs you.”

“Oh,” Edgar says, and looks back down at Jimmy’s hand - ties it with a weird finality by his wrist. “I’m sorry, I didn’t - “

“Christ, would you stop apologizing for shit that ain’t your fault,” he snaps, pulling his hand away and feeling hot around the collar and bitterly embarrassed all at once.

Edgar looks like he’s going to say something, but the kettle on the stove starts to scream, and he leaps up to pull it off the heat. By the time he turns around, Jimmy’s already pulled the glove back over the bandages and is getting to his feet. He feels an easy surge of rage flood his body again, pissed off at himself for saying something so phenomenally stupid, so sappy, for letting go of the anger just because his fucking sister said something nice to him - and then it’s back, pumping in his veins, and he gives the chauffeur a lopsided grin. “Well, this was fun,” he says, and Edgar is giving him a confused frown, and what the fuck, that pisses him off _so much worse,_ “but actually, I’d better scoot if I want this _lady_ out of my hair, know what I mean? Just point me at the keys and I’ll be on my way.”

“Sure,” Edgar says uncertainly, and points at the cabinet over the stove. “Did I do something to…” he trails off as Jimmy turns to give him as thoroughly unimpressed a look as he can manage when he’s looking at a guy who looks like _that,_ and shakes his head. “Nevermind. Drive safe.”

And he goes to fidget with the kettle while Jimmy takes the key, and he barely pauses at the door, barely sucks in the stale, too-warm air all around him, lets it press against his sweat-damp skin. He doesn’t look back at the man in the kitchen as he steps out into the night and chokes on the expanse of the estate, rolling out before him, yawning open to swallow him in the dark. He just takes the car and drives the old hag home, and forgets about everything except the feeling of the chauffeur’s form under his raggedy shirt, until he gets home and everything goes to shit.

 

———————————

Tess doesn’t dream when she sleeps. She never has. She maps the labyrinth instead.

It’s fucking freezing in there. Almost pitch black, with a subtle undercurrent of deep blue light, like the deepest ocean water before light stops penetrating entirely. She found a lantern when she was a child, maybe eight or nine, an old oil-powered thing to be lit with a match. It rarely stays on for long, and maybe that’s for the best.

It’s very dark in the labyrinth, and dangerously quiet. Tess learned long ago how to hide in its twisting corridors, to disappear into the walls, and to always cloak herself in pitch blue black. Long hair to hide the pale skin of her face. She hates the way it hangs in her eyes - if she had it her way, she’d shave the whole goddamn mop off. But it’s important to hide, here. To be quiet. To listen for the sound of footfalls and heavy breathing in the dark. To listen for _it._

Hoofbeats. A herd of animals scrambling after her in the dark.

She calls it the minotaur, though she’s seen it and knows what it isn’t, read: even vaguely humanoid. But what the fuck else is she supposed to call it, really? It’s a monster trapped in a maze with her, and it’s nothing of this world. The horses? The moose? The miserable creature of the dark, all rolling black eyes and gaping jaws dripping with bile and spittle and blood, screaming whispers in her ears even as she wakes? The minotaur it is, as it has always been.

The lantern fire is dimming, and she scowls. It shouldn’t be out just yet - she still needs it - she has something to do here, and very little time. She needs another effigy. She used the last one last night, and hates the danger of being down a resource.

But the air doesn’t stink of rotting meat, and she pauses, sniffing like a dog for its master. It stinks like - LSMFT. The way her heart thrums in her chest makes her feel nineteen and stupid again. The beast is trying to draw her out.

The hallway in front of her ends abruptly, and she turns, raises her lantern, watches where the flickering light reflects a shine on these perfectly smooth obsidian walls - and where it doesn’t. A door that Wasn’t but Is yawns a shadow in the pale gleam, and she steps through. The new hall is short, with openings along all sides, maybe three feet apart. Tess doesn’t have to look back to know the door she came through is gone. She picks a new doorway and lets the labyrinth shift around her.

Her breath clouds in front of her, and echoes claustrophobically in the low space. The ceiling is shorter here, only a foot above her head where in the past two halls it stretched miles up and away.

Distantly, several floors below her, she can hear the beast rumbling around, and a man screaming, high pitched and agonized. She has long since stopped trying to help fools who venture in. Better them than her. Anyway, with a little elbow grease and an iron stomach, their corpses can be harvested to keep her alive. The minotaur only eats the organs - it leaves behind everything useful.

She’ll wait until he stops screaming. Then she can make her way towards the last place she heard him and stake her claim.

She has an effigy to construct, after all.

 

_Lucky Strikes Means Fine Tobacco…_

It’s about two weeks before Edgar sees Jimmy again, which - which is his prerogative, really, and it’s hardly as if they’re, you know, actually _friends_. He tells himself he’s being ridiculous, feeling short-changed by some pissy rich kid not pushing his way into his house, because - well, because he _is_ ridiculous, really. He works all day, Jimmy plays all night, they’re - they’re different. Incompatible, really. He knows better than to dwell on things. He doesn’t think about Jimmy, especially not the way his body felt against him in the dark, and especially not at night.

Actually, he kind of figured that was the last of the kid he was ever going to see, just an enigmatic dream of an obsession, and he was - he was fine with that, really. Edgar knows better than to want more.

He knows better about a lot of things.

But he _does_ see the kid again - he’s holding the door of the Chrysler Imperial open for Mr. Reeds at eleven in the morning when Jimmy comes sprinting down the pathway from the house, informally dressed, banyan robe flaring out behind him, face contorted in rage. Held above his head like a Civil War general’s saber in a call to attack is a rolled up newspaper. Edgar squints. “Dad!” Jimmy shouts at maybe a hundred feet away, “Dad!”

“Shit,” his father says, and gets into the car.

Edgar stares, dumbstruck, as Jimmy rockets towards them at a speed he hadn’t realized humans had achieved, but his arm shuts the door on instinct a good ten seconds before Jimmy slams his entire body against it. Undeterred by the barrier, the kid pounds at the window with his fist.

“Where’s Tess?” He bellows through the glass.

“She’s at the office, where you _ought_ to be, if you had any sense, you lousy degenerate,” his father yells back, apparently unwilling to just roll the window down. Come to think of it, he might not even know how.

Jimmy rears a fist back, as though to break the glass entirely, but Edgar - seized by an impulse he didn’t know he had - grabs him by the wrist with one hand and presses the other against his chest, pushing him back.

“Jimmy,” he hisses, too quietly for the man in the car to hear, “what are you doing? What’s going on?”

And the boy looks at him, and something changes in his eyes for a second - they don’t soften, exactly, but it’s like the fire flickers, like the anger is replaced by something Edgar doesn’t understand but desperately wants to. But his eyes squint and he writhes out of Edgar’s grip with a grunt, not aggravated enough to throw a hook at him, and turns, runs in the direction of the garage.

Edgar looks down at his gloved hand and realizes, belatedly, that Jimmy’s not wearing a shirt. Blood rushes through his face, and he gets in the car before he can get distracted any further by that, uh - that train of thought, wheeling off the tracks and exploding below like some kind of chintzy fourpenny silent picture.

Mr. Reeds compliments him on his “fast action” in preventing further damage to the car, which almost makes Edgar feel worse about the whole thing. Unlike Tess, though, who uses the phone car to call her secretary and read out stock numbers or otherwise reads the paper in stoic silence with maybe a polite “and how is your family, Vargas?” somewhere in the middle of it, the old man is practically dotty and makes constant conversation the whole way down. He’s a miserable old bat, and utterly clueless - which serves Edgar fine, especially in this case, because it’s just _way_ too easy to get information out of someone who never shuts the hell up.

He isn’t allowed to ask direct questions, especially about family matters. It’s not in his contract, exactly, but it _is_ gauche, and with either of the ladies of the house, will get him a sharp glare over the rim of a pair of glasses and an answer he isn’t looking for. But he knows what to say to prompt dangerously hyperdetailed conversation in the man of the house. So he taps the steering wheel with a nervous finger and says “I’ve just never seen him that angry.”

The man in the backseat laughs. “Then you aren’t in the house often,” he says, “the real shocker is that he’s up before three in the afternoon - and that he got his mangy hands on my paper.” There’s a pause. “You know,” he says, “if it’s the paper - I guess it could be about the engagement.”

That gets Edgar’s attention. “The engagement, sir?”

 

———————————

If you wanna talk ivory towers, tower of Babel, whatever weird tower metaphor you go in for - and you live in New York - there’s no way around it. Your brain is already bolting towards the mental images of Reeds Manufacturing LTD. It’s an unprecedented forty stories high, dark concrete and brick cutting it against the horizon like a monolith against the setting sun, hundreds (if not thousands) of windows patterning the facade and glittering like diamonds in the light. Jimmy hasn’t been inside it since before he left for boarding school, and even then, only once or twice. Not that he really needs to know the layout of ninety-nine percent of the building - his sister’s office is always right at the top.

He doesn’t bother giving the elevator operator a tip, and the man doesn’t dare ask for one. No one stands in his way. Despite nineteen years of continued absence, everyone in the building knows exactly who he is. They leave him a heady wake, conscious of his rage and unwilling to touch anything so red-hot.

Except, of course, Cleo.

“Where’s my sister?” He asks her, and she barely looks up from her desk calendar. She’s ridiculously attractive, in a hardened, disinterested sort of way. She’s also a total bitch.

“She’s in her office,” she says, “but she can’t be disturbed. She’s very busy.”

“I wanna see her.”

To her credit, she doesn’t bend for an instant - then again, there’s an Aesop about the grass and the oak tree, isn’t there? “There’s an opening in her schedule at four fifteen this afternoon,” she says dully, “or one tomorrow at - “

“I wanna see her _now,_ Cleo,” he snaps.

“Well, I’m _sorry_ ,” she snaps back, not sounding particularly sorry, “but she has a meeting with eight board members from Ford Motors, and she’s not to be disturbed. Now, you can either - “

Jimmy reaches forward and slams the button on Cleo’s desk to unlock the door to his sister’s office - it slides open, and he storms through even as Cleo yells after him in increasingly aggravated tones.

“Tess, I wanna talk to you,” he shouts, right as he rounds the corner onto the meeting room inside the absurdly spacious office. Ten faces turn to look at him - eight (8) men in varying states of withering decay, one (1) secretary typing madly into a dictaphone, and his sister, her horn-rimmed spectacles replaced by a pair of half-moon readers. She looks dangerously unimpressed.

“Ask Ms. Patra for an appointment,” she says.

In response, Jimmy slams the newspaper down on the table and stares her down from across the room. The ice in her returning glare is equally potent - but she sighs and shrugs. No stamina.

“My apologies, gentlemen,” she says, standing, “let’s take a ten minute recess and reconvene at - “ she checks her watch - “twelve forty-five.”

The men in the room give each other knowing looks and file out quickly. Tess puts her head in her hands. “Alright,” she says, as the last suit slips out the door, “what’s this about, now?”

Jimmy doesn’t even have to look down at the paper - he’s been playing and replaying the headline of the society column in his head the whole drive down, blood burning and boiling until it’s boiling over. God forbid it doesn’t start pouring out of his damn eyes. But he points at it for emphasis. “ _’It looks like wedding bells again for James Reeds - the girl is Anne Gwish of Gwish Steel Incorporated,’_ ” he spits.

The worst - the most _infuriating_ thing is that Tess barely reacts, like she expected this argument, like she knew how upset he’d be, which - yeah. “Congratulations,” she says dryly, not even bothering with inflections.

Jimmy snaps the paper back up in his hand. “Did you plant this?” He hits it against the top of the table.

Tess watches him for a moment over the flat rim-tops of her glasses. “Jimmy,” she says after a moment, “I had an interesting conversation with Vargas a few weeks ago.”

For a second, all that heat evaporates, leaving his stomach cold and dark and bloodless. “The driver?” He says, feigning confusion. His feet feel unsteady beneath him. In her eyes, there’s a flicker of something, and he knows he’s paused too long.

“It was the morning after mother’s party, I think,” she says, “I seem to recall taking the drive with two windows down, since it was such a lovely morning. Seventy-five before the sun came up.” Unaffected by her frozen, gawping brother, Tess strolls nonchalantly to her desk on the other side of the room. Besides the waiting room that Cleo treats like her own personal beauty salon when she thinks no one’s looking, the entire top floor of the building is her office, windows on three walls and shafted in morning light. Their parents don’t have shit on either of them, but Tess is a monarch, gleaming in the light of her glass palace, and the slow way she’s moving flips Jimmy’s stomach in an altogether unpleasant way. “But Vargas was wearing white gloves when I came by the garage. I didn’t even know he owned white gloves - they’re certainly not part of his uniform. I suppose they could have been church gloves, but…” she trails off.

Jimmy watches her as her forehead bends, her eyebrows pulling together, and he thinks of that first moment in the melting alleyway, of Edgar’s face as he said _a job that doesn’t give me much time for morning masses,_ and he knows what she’s thinking. “Not that we give him time off to attend,” he reminds her. Shift the blame. Pass the guilt.

“True. We give most of our employees little to no time off and no compensation. It’s practically criminal.” She taps her finger against the desktop idly. “What little time we give him is in the evening. You know, I asked Vargas what happened to his gloves, the ones that are part of his uniform.”

“What did he say?”

She shrugs. “Nothing much,” she says, and Jimmy feels a wave of relief wash over him. He might be a nervous wreck, and he’s probably not a convincing liar, but at least Edgar’s not a rat. There’s something…something in his stomach, telling him Edgar is trustworthy. “He told me one of them had been damaged somehow the night before, and - rather than wear only one glove - it seemed more professional to wear white. I offered to replace them, of course.” She pauses. “You know, I seem to recall _you_ wearing a single glove that night, Jimmy,” she says, and light flashes over her glasses, “what was it, black leather?”

“I don’t know what you’re implying,” Jimmy says, and crosses his arms. When in doubt, deny everything, right? Right. “Anyway, I don’t see what that has to do with - “

“Do you have any sense of decency? Any sense of respect?” She snaps, and Jimmy jolts - Tess can’t hold fire, but she has bursts of real rage, serious anger. The floodlights are on him -

_It was so fragile, the shell was so fragile and he didn’t mean to hold it so tight -_

“The Vargases have worked for our family for forty goddamn years and we have never given them a goddamn _vacation day_ in recompense. Edgar Vargas has spent his _entire life_ on our premises and he has never asked for anything but the few hours of privacy we give him in the evening,” she snaps, stepping forward as Jimmy steps back, “and you would intrude upon that, too! You would intrude in his house without the merest apology, the _slightest_ guilt?”

“It’s our property,” Jimmy growls back, “it’s our house! We own that house!”

“ _But we don’t own him!_ ”

Silence.

Jimmy hadn’t realized how close Tess had gotten while she was yelling, but she’s barely a foot from him now, glasses pulled off her face in some moment of her tirade and eyes burning like a reflection of the sun. Something gritty and ugly is seeping through his skin, something ashamed and oil-slick and black. All he wants is to look away.

“We might as well,” he says quietly, “we hired him. He’s got nowhere else to go.”

Tess stares at him. “Unbelievable,” she says after a moment, ice cold and distant and _thedarkthedarkthedark_ puts her glasses back on as she turns her face away, “you’re just like dad.”

_He didn’t mean to hold it so tight, it was an accident, he didn’t mean to -_

“Listen to me, Jimmy,” she says, voice strange and alien, “you’re going to marry Anne Gwish because I said so. She’s everything you’ve asked for in a woman - your age, miserable, cynical. Nothing like the last girl. I don’t think I’ve _ever_ heard Anne mention the stars being God’s daisy chains or ‘widdle bunnies’. No chance of you falling in love with her, either, I trust.”

“Are you punishing me?”

She shrugs. “This may shock you, but you factor into maybe four percent of most of my decisions,” she says, “Reeds Manufacturing is going in another direction. God forbid we get idle, God forbid we sit on our heels. A few months ago, I struck up a conversation with a man involved in the production of commercial airplanes, and I thought - why aren’t we involved in transportation? It’s a ludicrously profitable market right now. Planes, trains, automobiles. Cargo ships.”

Jimmy frowns. This conversation is going in a very dangerous and unenviable direction, and he’s growing more aware by the second of its destination. “And this wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that the Gwish family owns the largest steel mill east of the Mississippi, would it?” He spitballs.

Tess shuffles some papers on her desk. “Second largest. The largest have no daughter.”

“So you’ve been arranging this for…months? And you didn’t bother telling me? No…no memo, no nothing?” He stuffs his hands in his pockets. “Sneaking around behind my back?”

“Does it constitute sneaking if I actually left you a short string of memos? I told you about this two months ago and you signed on.” She pauses, purses her lips. “Alright, so the newspaper thing _was_ me punishing you, a little bit. Honestly, if I realized I could get you into my office by just publishing slander in the paper, I would’ve done it years ago.”

Jimmy doesn’t remember that. He doesn’t remember signing anything for anyone. Then again, he _also_ doesn’t remember the absinthe drip he apparently set up at The Ganymede, or three quarters of the month of April. The back of his neck goes cold with sweat. He could have done _anything_ two months ago. “Why?”

She shrugs. “Business.”

“No, I mean - why do you _care?_ Why’s it matter if we do steel production or, or if we go into plastics or sugar cane or whatever? Why are you _doing_ this to me?”

“Don’t be a child,” she says coldly, “I’m doing this to protect you. New York wants to eat you alive. Three times a bachelor isn’t doing you any favors in a city like this. You have a reputation, Jimmy, and I don’t care if it’s true or not, but I’m not sitting around and letting it drag down the market again. Understand?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says stiffly. His sister’s perpetual chill is infectious. There’s ice water flowing through his veins.

“You can play as dumb as you like,” she says, “just as long as you show up and walk down the aisle on time. I don’t care if you like her. Honestly, I don’t think I could trust your judgement if you told me you _did._ She’s a miserable bitch with a weak arm, which is exactly what you requested after the last three. You’ll thank me for that one day.”

Jimmy stands stock still. He can feel the ground moving under his feet, trying to buck him loose, but he’s frozen in place.

_He’d wanted to hold one, he’d just wanted to hold one, he hadn’t realized they were so fragile -_

“I think you’re going to be very happy, Jimmy,” his sister says, and smiles like a shark.

 

———————————

At around eight, Johnny stretches his arms languorously and announces that it’s late, and that he’d better get to sleep. Edgar hardly seems to notice, just hums attentively and bids him a goodnight as he lays out another game of solitaire.

Nny picks up his gloves, slaps them passively into the palm of his other hand. “I’m going to sleep,” he repeats stiffly.

“Alright. Sleep well.”

“Yep. I’m going to lie down in bed and close my eyes and everything.”

Edgar raises an eyebrow at him and smiles, but makes no further comment, and Nny slips into his room and closes the door behind him. After a moment’s hesitation, he locks it, too.

It’s a small room, which suits him fine. The bedspread is perfectly flat and dusty with misuse, though the carpet practically has holes worn through it from footsteps. There’s a fish tank by the window (closed and boarded shut from the inside) with no fish and maybe a gallon of dirty water in it, and a bookshelf crammed with thick, well-used volumes of German texts.

And there’s a standing lamp, which has one of those round hat things that makes it look like a mushroom. He’s very fond of that lamp. It’s a silly little thing.

He turns the light off, pulls his gloves back on, and sits cross-legged on the floor in the center of the rug. The roar of the ocean fills his ears, whispering pale blue secrets against a grey shoreline. It’s too shallow here, and too empty, and too warm. He closes his eyes and dives.

The labyrinth is dark, black for all it matters, coiling shadows and geometric edges, and Nny is home. He strides along the black obsidian floors, smiles at the alien smoothness of the walls, runs gloved fingers in stringing pathways against the belly of the beast. He turns a corner and looks down a fresh hallway - at the end, strung up on lightning-burned wood poles, there’s a wet, pink-red shape, a lump of flesh and blood roped up like a scarecrow, buzzing and rotting with a swarm of black flies. Around what might generously be referred to as its neck, a golden ankh hangs on a chain.

He turns back the way he came. It’s no good to bother with Tess’ plans. Honestly, he’s lucky she hasn’t caught him here yet - if she fires him in the real world, he’ll have to find work elsewhere, and he’s really been appreciating the easy passageway she’s built between New York and the Master’s World.

Distant footsteps. He presses his way through one of the walls and comes out on the other side, dipping out of sight. The Master must be somewhere, that foul beast of greed and pride. From the sound of it, it’s somewhere down below him. Nny taps a foot on the ground and slides down the hole that Wasn’t but Is, crawling his way back out as the gravity shifts a hundred and eighty degrees around him. The floor he fell through is below him, now, and he can hear Tess’ foot steps pass under him and away into the dark. He listens to her go, then slips away through another hallway, gaping open for him.

“Master,” he calls, though the very word curls his lip backwards in disgust, “where are you, you miserable gluttonous tick? I’m here to feed you, if your filthy hunger still lies unquenched. Open the pathway, you fucking - “

The doorway he steps through leads into an enormous, empty black space, a cavernous geometric cube full of darkness and wet mist and silence. There’s a rumbling, like a deep chirruping mess of fleeing woodland creatures, and a rising darkness - a shift, a deeper black than anything on the Earth or in the solar system, the perfect blackness of a vacuum to swallow him whole. The eyes, thousands of eyes sprout in the darkness, and then it surrounds him, a tight and choking mass of incomprehensible terror enveloping him.

Nny smiles humorlessly. “Toy with me all you want,” he says, “but I know what you want me to pay. What will you take? I can tear my own liver out for you, if you’d like. I’m nothing if not a professional. Or will you strike me lower? How much lower can you strike me?”

A maw opens in the darkness, pointed and angled at him, filled with blood-wet teeth. It chitters.

“Oh,” Nny says, and steps back, “I guess you could do that.”

 

———————————

Edgar’s having a calming mug of tea (about fifty percent whiskey, the bottle of which he’s hidden carefully under the table somewhere - never let it be said that the Vargases refuse to learn lessons after events from which there are no consequences) when Jimmy kicks the door in and storms straight into the kitchen. He looks up, watches the boy’s fuming form, and looks down at his tea. He’d figured it’d have been upset by the shock, but apparently, his arms have never been calmer.

“So,” he says, “not that I’d ever object to your intrusion, but is there, maybe, a _reason_ you’re here at ten thirty in the evening?” He’d been about to go to bed. He’s exhausted, and no part of him is growing drowsier with the relieved realization that whatever this is, it matters enough to Jimmy to get him here at a miserable hour of the night.

“C’mon, tea? Don’t you have anything stronger stowed away?” Jimmy won’t look at him. “Where’s Johnny?”

“He went to sleep, just a few hours ago,” Edgar says, “please don’t wake him up, he gets unmanageable in the evening.”

Jimmy’s shoulders stiffen. “I’m not here for him,” he says quietly, and turns to look at Edgar - and something hot and molten rolls down his chest into his stomach when he looks into those dark, wet eyes. “Come on. What are you drinking? Pour me one out.”

“It’s just tea,” he lies, and looks down into it. It’s almost true. He figures tea leaves might be a new way to - look, if he’s a Cassandra, he wants to know how it works and what he can use. Tea leaves work for some people. Maybe they’ll work for him. “Look, would you stop stalling? What the hell happened?”

“My sister happened,” Jimmy says, and throws the paper down. Edgar reads the society column in silence.

“Shit,” he breathes, after two minutes have passed. “Is it true?”

“Fucking - of course it’s - “ he breaks off and makes a frustrated noise. “I don’t _know,_ okay? I sure as fuck never - I mean - it’s just Tess pushing me into shit again, I don’t even know what her fucking problem is with me, how can she - I mean, it’s not like she fucking owns me, you know? None of her fucking business.” He combs a hawkish hand through slicked-back hair. “But she did all this - all this fuckin’ business jargon, and I don’t know how much of it is real, how much she can - like, legally - what can she even force me to do, right?”

“Breathe,” Edgar says, passing him his mug of tea, “and drink.”

The boy looks at it, like he’s trying to remember what to do with it, then turns it and drinks from the same side Edgar’s been drinking from, which - uh - okay. He winces. “That is not ‘just’ fucking tea,” he mutters into the rim, then downs the rest of it. Edgar pretends not to watch.

“So…” he looks down at the paper just as Jimmy looks up like he’s going to make eye contact, staring resolutely at the printed image of Miss Gwish squinting prettily back at the reader, “do you…I mean, is there…are you attracted to her, at all?”

Jimmy snorts, leans back in his chair - and when did he sit down? “That bitch? Fuck no,” he says, “fucking hate her. She’s one of those - one of those snobby fuckin’ poets, one of those ivory tower bitches, you know the type. I fucking hate those girls. And I hate _her_ worse than any of them.”

“She’s a very handsome woman,” Edgar says, ignoring the soft release in his chest, like something clenching him has gone off to meddle with whatever other internal organs are there to get messed with, “why don’t you - “

He scoffs. “You know, contrary to popular belief, I care about more than just a woman’s _looks,_ ” Jimmy says. “I’ve got depth, you know? I care about that deep shit. Like…uh, like does she…” He waves his hands ineffectually. “You know, is she generally, like, a decent human being? What kind of cigarettes does she smoke? How does she feel about me bumming them off her? That kind of stuff.”

“Digging deep, huh?”

“Don’t fucking judge me. What do _you_ look for in a woman, if you’re so smart?”

Edgar pauses - and that’s the wrong thing to do, he realizes, because when he looks in Jimmy’s eyes there’s no _gotcha,_ there’s no _answer me,_ there’s nothing but hunger, and those dark, pupil-blown eyes burn a hole right through him. “I - that’s not really any of your business,” he says, and that’s the wrong thing too.

Jimmy puts his palms on the table and leans forward. “Isn’t it?” He says, and Edgar feels his skin stand on end. “You belong to me, right? Come on. What do you _want,_ Edgar?”

And what Edgar _wants_ \- what he wants is to keep those eyes on his, to feel those clawed fingers grab him by the throat and push him back -

“Back up, Jimmy,” he says, calmly, even as his heart races in his chest, “stay on target. You were telling me why you don’t want to get married to a beautiful woman, again?”

There’s a pause - Edgar can _feel_ Jimmy pushing against him - but after a moment, the boy sits back in his chair, and Edgar breathes a surreptitious sigh of relief. He doesn’t miss the flash of satisfaction in those dark eyes, but he’s just too tired, worn to the bone, and he can’t argue. “First off, they used a very flattering picture for the article,” Jimmy grouses, and crosses his arms over his chest. “She is not exactly a stellar beauty. I mean, she’s good at makeup, and shit. She can look good when it counts. But she’s not, like. You know, she’s no Katharine Hepburn, or anything.”

“And that’s…important.”

“ _And,_ ” adds Jimmy, clearly sensing that the yarn he’s spinning isn’t particularly impressive, and he’d better throw something better down quick, “she’s a miserable bitch, which is more the issue. Chill, man. I was addressing issues in order of your concern, I.E., you calling her a beautiful woman when she’s more of a slightly-above-average woman. Anyway, since when do you care about how beautiful women are?”

“I know what you’re trying to do, Jimmy,” Edgar says, “I’m not rising to the most obvious bait this side of the moon.”

“Fine. Whatever. It’s just that she’s _such_ a _bitch,_ ” he says, and leans back in the chair, “and she - she kicks puppies probably, and writes scathing reviews of good movies to publish in the newspaper because they’ve got girls prettier than her in them, and she talks shit about my sister, and - and my _fucking sister_ is the one who wants me to marry her,” he says, slumping. “And god, if she can’t legally force me to marry her - she’s definitely going to do whatever’s in her power to pressure me into doing it. You should’ve seen it today. Christ, she pulled out every stop in her arsenal - the machine’s already in motion, Edgar.” He fumbles in his pocket for a cigarette, then pats his pockets for a lighter - by the time he realizes he hasn’t got one, the smoke is already between his fingers, unlit and tempting. He buries his face in his hands. “It’s over again. I can’t get out.”

Edgar looks at him, pityingly - then just at the cigarette, unable to stare at a man in dire straights in good conscience. He’s trapped, a fox with a leg caught in a steel bite - lashing out and desperate for escape. There must be a lighter in his pockets somewhere. “I know how you feel,” he says quietly.

“Do you?”

There’s malice in the tone - sarcasm, more like. But Edgar stares him in the eye as he raises his head up to look back at him. “You know that I do,” he says, and lights Jimmy’s cigarette for him.

They sit in silence, breathing in the smoke as it slowly fills the table. Edgar stares out the window, pretending not to be desperate for a puff - Jimmy staring at him in his peripheral. It’s starting to make him nervous, actually.

“You want some?” Jimmy asks, after several minutes.

“I probably shouldn’t.”

“Yeah, probably,” he agrees, “but do you want some?”

Edgar sighs. “Of course.”

He expects Jimmy to pass the cigarette to him - instead, he turns it backwards in his hands, filter out towards his knuckles and the burning stump inwards towards himself, and holds his hand out towards him. Edgar looks at it, and looks at the way the boy is watching him. And, with a sigh, he leans in, wraps his lips around the stump, and sucks smoke into his lungs - then breathes it out, lets it pour and coil over the boy’s fingers in rivers of grey-blue smoke.

The look on Jimmy’s face is almost worth the hell he’s going to catch for it later. It’s not like Edgar’s entirely stupid, after all. He knows what he’s doing.

“Shit,” Jimmy says after a second, less certain than he normally sounds, “what are we doing here?”

“You tell me,” Edgar says, “you’re the one who could get away.”


	4. Contemplating Jazz

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A crash course in temporary escape

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have listened.... to so much Fall Out Boy while writing this at the week long residency for my graduate program where I was supposed to be thinking about my future but instead I was thinking about Jimmy getting real fucked up and nasty in public, anyways here's [Edgar's outfit](http://chokopoppo.tumblr.com/post/169939432797/sauntervaguelydown-sometimes-you-just-gotta-say) and here's the [playlist](https://8tracks.com/desdemonakaylose/some-were-born-to-endless-night#) I promise you it only has two songs by FOB

 

 

 

>  I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, [...]  
>  who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats  
>  floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz  
>  - _Howl_ , Alan Ginsberg

 

 

Running is what Jimmy knows how to do best. Out into the night, into the pits and puddles of black water in the lightless alleys, through this moment and into another one, it wouldn't be the first time. The cigarette between his fingers is burning down to a stub, ready to sear his one good hand to shit, and Edgar is running his tongue along his teeth like he's chasing the taste of Jimmy's mouth - what Jimmy's mouth would taste like if he leaned in now, just like that, tobacco and fire -

Jimmy stubs out the cherry on Edgar's table and says, "Alright. Then let's get out of here."

Edgar's eyes flicker wide, all of him freezing in place. "I'm sorry?" he says.

Jimmy's already up, though, buttoning his jacket closed. He digs his keys out of his pocket and dangles them, glinting, from his finger. He’s got some stuff in a bag in his car, but they’re walking most of the way so other than that he’ll just have to make do with what he’s wearing and count on his money to carry him the rest of the way. When he turns back to the table, expectant, Edgar's deer-in-the-headlights surprise is rolling back to cool disapproval.

"You do realize I'm a driver," Edgar says, giving the keys on the wall a pointed look. "Your sister literally pays me to drive you all."

"Lucky you," Jimmy says. "You get to take a break. Pull a jacket on if you want, we're going somewhere warm anyway."

“I was actually about to sleep,” Edgar says, pointing haphazardly over his shoulder towards his rooms. “I have a drive at six in the morning, your sister has a meeting with the Gwishes -”

His face goes ashen and tight. All the fucked up ugly things that have been boiling under this conversation come bursting up into Jimmy’s throat like vomit, ready to burn him out from the inside. Edgar winces. Edgar chews his lip. “Hold on,” Edgar says, “let me put on my shoes.”

Jimmy watches him as he ducks into the cubby by the door and drags out his work shoes, bad match for his shirtsleeves and his gloveless hands. Standing in the doorway, he follows Edgar’s tiny homely movements like a bird of prey, tracking a brown shadow through the underbrush.

Edgar’s got no part in it, he knows that, Edgar’s got no part in anything, but what Jimmy wants right now more than anything is to get Edgar so drunk that he can’t even climb into the driver’s seat tomorrow, can’t take Tess to her stupid meeting, can’t be dragged away and put in a box like a toy Jimmy’s betrayed too much liking for. Instead Edgar could be lying in his bed, dizzy and soft, as thoroughly hobbled as if he’d been tied down by the ankles. _That's_ what Jimmy wants.

The door creaks as they step down into the night. Jimmy swings through the garage and digs his bag out of the trunk, and then closes it behind him. They don’t need the car tonight, he thinks. It’s harder to find those cracks in the air on a normal night, but there’s something in the garden - he can feel it like it’s sonar, a weak spot eating up his pings - something down at the middle of the hedge maze maybe, it feels like that’s the right direction. It’s closer tonight, closer than he’s used to finding it. He leads in silence.

“Um,” Edgar says, “where are we going, exactly?”

Greenwich village, Jimmy tells him.

As Jimmy tears on, feeling into the darkness for that weak spot, the thickness in the air, Edgar stops at the gate to the hedge maze. “You’re not going to walk through that place again, are you?”

Jimmy turns back to him. Edgar clutches a hand against the trellis where the wysteria grows, curling away from Jimmy and this whole moment with every bend in his body. “Of course I am,” Jimmy says. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“I wouldn’t even know where to start with that list,” Edgar says. “Didn’t you feel it in there? It was so cold I thought it was trying to rip me apart.”

“It’s just space,” Jimmy says, bouncing impatiently against the grass. “It’s not trying to do anything. Come on, we’re losing time.”

Edgar doesn’t move. Jimmy feels like he’s about to vibrate out of his skin, stuck in the pull between his need to run and Edgar, standing there, rooted to the earth. He makes a noise between his teeth and sticks out a hand, white palm in the darkness, a road between himself and Edgar. 

“I wanna show you something,” he says. “I wanna help you escape.”

The wind ruffles the vines all around them in a whimper of leaves.

Edgar looks at his hand. Edgar reaches out, broad palm and soapbubble wrist, and he closes his hand around Jimmy’s. Ozone crackles across Jimmy’s skin, thick and hot with the promise of lightning. He doesn’t know if it’s real or it’s all in his head, but when he steps back into the maze, the air splits around him and swallows them both whole.

It’s so cold in the endless night, the moment between moments, but his hand is burning hot where Edgar touches it.

 

* * *

 

On the other side of New York City, _Moonlight in Vermont_ is playing much smaller and quieter, spinning on a record player in the second story of Our Lady of Guadalupe. A bent copy of _Orlando_ sits on the floor, pages in disarray, abandoned on the first chapter. Orlando has just woken up as a woman in a Romany caravan in Turkey. In the attic above, Tenna is waking up to go open the restaurant, her bakers' hours just barely overlapping Devi's night club hours at the wrong end.

Devi stands on the balcony of the church's second story, smoking a lucky strike as the street simmers up into the night below her. They were standing here, twenty years ago, when Tess asked her to come work at the manor. Devi can still feel it in her bones when she thinks too hard, how the air was turning claw sharp with the grip of winter, the ice in the gutters, the moon pale and sputtering like an exhaust cloud. It was too cold to stand outside doing nothing, but Tenna wouldn't let her smoke in the house - still won't - and she was feeling hungry, it was another night before she got her paycheck from Pachito but she was determined to ride it out. And Tess had come out and leaned against the banister beside her, with her glasses bigger and brighter and rounder than the moon, and she'd said, you know you don't have to live like this - say the word and I'll take you away -

Devi puts out her cigarette on the rail. It's summer, but that doesn't matter. Her marrow is frozen solid in her bones. Behind her, scattered over the floor of the loft, the society pages squint up at her with accusing black and white eyes. She doesn't know what possessed her to read it. She's been ignoring Tess Reeds for twenty years and has no plans to come crawling back now like a stray dog with an empty stomach. It was just that Manuel was sitting at the bar during closing, reading the press-hot four AM edition as she drank her closing gin and tonic and scanned over his shoulder and, like a shot in the night, there was the face. Jimmy's face. Precisely the same as it was in '38, roguish and rumpled, as if even all the money in New York couldn't make him clean up for a photo. Her brother. Of course Devi knows she had a brother on the way, she mentioned it enough fucking times, but.

What is this? Her paranoia can't help but whisper that it's a glove across the cheek, another fucking charity case, a boot heel grinding in her palm. Tess's last smug parting shot - send her brother in to do what she won't, to take care of the mess she thinks Devi is too weak to handle. And if Devi needed help, whose fault is that? Devi _asked_ for her help. They were supposed to be in this together, a team, and then Tess fucks off for Long Island in the middle of the night like they had never had an argument before? And now here she is two decades later, with her errand boy brother spy and the pretty young thing squinting up at the camera, as the article says, _intimate friend of Tess Reeds, Ms. Gwish is thrilled to be joining the family at long last -_

_Orlando_ sits on the floor, waiting for her fifteenth reread. Devi can't read those pulp novels that the girls at the bars are always sliding across the table, like a calling card. She knows how they end. She knows how they all end - one girl locked up in the asylum, abandoned, and the other girl whisked away to ride towards wedded doom in the passenger seat of a man whom she claims to love. No one needs to tell Devi how they all end. The only thing less certain is who will be abandoned, and who will be swept away.

 

* * *

 

The Stonewall Inn is at its best in about ten years, give or take, with the neon sign burning down the wall and the rising sound of laughter or sirens, depending on what time of night it is. Jimmy’s drunk his fair share of whiskey from the shot glasses that pass through the trough behind the counter, where the water has to be brought in before each shift because the plumbing doesn’t work. Jimmy’s spent his fair share of nights slung over the shoulders of boys who have only just barely been born, only ducking out for the night when he hears the sound of a name he might know. He wants to show Edgar that - not to go too far forward, spook the man and lose him - but to show him at least a taste of that world. Daring possibilities, escape, somewhere you can truly be lost in, at least for a while.

But this isn’t Greenwich Village, and Jimmy doesn’t know how the fuck that happened because he was clearly trying to reach Greenwich Village. This is another place entirely.

Edgar pauses, his hand in Jimmy’s hand, and looks up into the looming fronts of the brownstones around them. “This is the same night,” he says, wonder and fear softening his voice.

“What?” Jimmy says, but he’s looking up too, and the way Edgar says it, what else could it really be. His heart lurches, flooding his skin with hot blood like an old jalopy cranking to frenetic life. The front of the familiar restaurant slumps away into shadow just ahead of them, the air smelling freshly of ash and unseasonable ice. When he looks back at Edgar, Edgar is staring at him with this helpless, wounded expression, damningly silent.

“I didn’t take us here,” Jimmy says, “I mean - I didn’t mean to, I wasn’t even aiming for the past!” He swings his bag from one shoulder to the other, bouncing his heels again. “I don’t know what’s fucking happening here, I never overshoot like this on my own.”  

He can’t look directly at Edgar, but out of the corner of his eyes he can see Edgar relax a few inches, less wounded than before. Jimmy relaxes a few inches too. There’s a ringing crash from the courtyard beyond the restaurant, and they both jump at the sound.

“It’s still happening,” Edgar says, softly.

“How long were we gone?” Jimmy says.

Edgar reaches into his pocket, frowning thoughtfully, and comes up with the pack of cards Devi loaned him two weeks ago. “I forgot,” he murmurs. “This is the same jacket…”

They both look down at the antique deck, neither of them really wanting to say what they’re wondering, when a second crash and a ringing _fuck!_ breaks the quiet. Jimmy takes a step toward the ruckus without thinking, and only notices where he’s going when Edgar grabs him by the shoulder. His heart is still grinding like an old truck and whether it’s the night or the touch or the jump through space is anyone’s guess. He could barely bring himself to leave the first time. There’s no way he’s turning chicken now.

“Stay behind if you want,” he says, shaking himself free. “I’ll pick you up when I’ve whipped that big slimy fucker once and for all.”

“You’re not even armed!” Edgar says. “There’s only so much literal flaying a body can handle, even yours.”

Jimmy reaches into his own pocket and pulls out the single black glove from Edgar’s uniform, never returned, hot with the memory of his own body. Unlike Edgar, he can’t claim this is the same jacket as before. He slides it on, fingers just a little too big for the digits inside, and closes his fist. He smiles.

“That sounds like a challenge,” he says.

Back through the street and the burnt trellises, around the back of the restaurant, and into the hot-flaring center of action beyond. Jimmy is running before he knows it, his breath hard in his ears. The courtyard explodes into light like the snap of a photograph, searing onto his retinas the whole monstrous shape of the thing that seems to be climbing out of the darkness. Curling limbs like trunks have buried themselves in the brick, straining as if they were physically dragging their body through the squeeze of the sky on either side. What lies between the outline of the brownstone is so lightless and abyssal that the sky around it seems incandescent with its indigo darkness.

The air is thick, fractured with a thousand crackingling moments, and it’s as much instinct as anything else when Jimmy throws himself between one and emerges moments earlier, in the middle of the fray. Johnny, a step away, pauses to give him a curious look, and then returns to his own efforts. Above them, the whole alien thing towers and writhes. Jimmy wants to sink his teeth into it, except even he’s not dumb enough to try that.

A limb scythes out of the darkness, silver where the moonlight touches it, and slams him. His mouth pops open in shock, his hand snaps closed around the thing, and he shouts “Fuck!” as he falls back into another fractured moment. The limb comes with him. You can’t really see in the space between moments, but when he comes back out the other side his glove is empty again. The leather shines, smooth and dry, soft with use.

Logic tells him it was probably the cards in Edgar’s pocket that dragged them back here, but in his heart Jimmy thinks that maybe it was him after all, maybe it was how bad he wanted this--the taste in his mouth like pennies, the burning in his ribs, the ice that grows in his bones. From the ground he watches Johnny scale the enormous segments of a limb like a fallen tree, blades flashing. Fuck, where did he leave that knife before? It’s been two weeks, he can’t remember--did he drop it when Edgar pulled him away? Did he take it back with him?

Because it’s the only thing he knows how to do, Jimmy climbs back up into the fray. He takes hold of huge whipping tentacles and drags them down into the void, shearing them free of the monster as surely as if each moment really was a slice of fractured glass. With every dive back into the void, air seems to be crystallizing heavy in Jimmy’s lungs, like snow filling him up from the inside. He stumbles, breathing frost out of his blue lips, and presses his hands into his thighs for support. A hand closes over his shoulder.

“Keep it together,” Devi says, her fingers tight around him. There’s sweat beading on her lip, ruining the cool impression of her silk mask.

“How do we kill it?” Jimmy says, wincing as the snowdrift in his lungs seems to collapse.

“We don’t,” Devi says grimly. “All we can do is hurt it enough to make it pull back.”

“Okay,” Jimmy says, “so how do we do that?”

Devi just looks up at the encroaching monster, her mouth an unhappy line. Jimmy follows her gaze. It occurs to him for the first time that this might be this biggest beeb any of them have seen before, not just him. His stomach flips, not just with nausea.

Tenna is still throwing fireballs, relentless, up at the very front of the action. The explosions which were such a killer with the smaller monsters only seem to chew holes in this gogmagog motherfucker. Johnny steps backwards, retreating from the fight until he’s standing beside Devi and Jimmy. He looks up too.

“Esmoquin,” he says, and it takes Jimmy a second to realize that means him. Johnny points one of his short swords up at the top of the building, where a stray limb curls against the sky. “Can you get me up there?”

Jimmy frowns. He’s never tried it before, but why not? He holds out his hand, the bare one, and he says, “I’m game if you are.”

Johnny eyes his hand suspiciously, but after a moment, he reaches out and takes it. Even in the heat, Johnny’s hand is gloved in one of those thin soft gloves that Jimmy remembers from home. Jimmy can feel his bones through the cloth. It’s kind of disconcerting, but when Jimmy pulls him through the moment he still does it with a jerk, smirking to himself as Johnny stumbles after him.

The ice in his lungs throbs, the void throbs, his stomach heaves--

Jimmy emerges into empty space two stories off the ground and abruptly realizes why the fuck this was such a bad idea.

He can hear a ripping, sizzling sound that he will realize in retrospect is Johnny carving his way down the forest of whipping limbs, laughing wildly as each one gives way to another on the breathless descent, but right now all he can think of is his life flashing before his eyes. Well not really flashing. He tumbles through the air, grasping for slippery handholds, which he finds and loses--it’s not so much flashing as it is bubbling, ugly thoughts popping against his memory--until finally his chest whumps into one of the bigger ones halfway down and he swings to a stop in midair.

He really should have killed that bastard on the polo team while he had a chance, before the damn horse could brain him. Tess would have had a field day with actual murder, but it would have been so worth it just to see the look on his face when he realized the skinny little gunsel from the freshmen dorms was the one holding the bat now.

Jimmy’s ungloved hand starts to sizzle, and before he realizes what he’s doing, he’s already let go. He doesn’t know how he gets to the ground. He must have grabbed something else on the way down, but his head is so white hot with panic that it takes him a moment just to realize he’s not smeared across the brick. He takes a deep, shuddering breath, and slowly starts to become aware of the thing he’s landed against. It’s human arms.

“Shit shit shit,” Edgar is saying, like a prayer, over and over again. “Why would you do that, holy shit.”

Jimmy cranes his neck, trying to get a good look at Edgar’s face despite the way he’s being clutched. His tongue is heavy with brick dust. “You caught me,” he says, like an absolute dumbfuck.

The ground gives a terrible ceramic screech. The last limb that was buried there is dragging back, towards the hole in the night where the rest of the silver writhing slivers of nightmare are already retreating. One by one, they’re sucked into the darkness, and then, with a groan, the brownstone is just a brownstone again.

The night is silent.

Tenna starts laughing, and then despite the ice and the dust and the nausea, Jimmy starts laughing too. He sags against Edgar’s arms. They’re on the ground; he must have knocked Edgar over when he came down. Edgar’s arms relax around him, but they don’t fall away.

“Your ass must hurt,” Jimmy says.

“It does,” Edgar says, very seriously, and that sends Jimmy into another fit of laughter. As Devi passes by she pats them both on the shoulder. Tenna jogs over and pulls him to his feet, sweeping him into a hug, and Jimmy’s head spins. He can’t remember the last time he touched anyone he wasn’t about to sleep with. It’s weird, but it’s good?

Tenna pulls back. “Where’s your mask?” she says. She gives him a second look over. “Is that a different jacket?” she says.

“Uh,” Jimmy says.

A few steps away, Johnny is sheathing his swords in the folds of his coat. This close he’s unmistakable, although his hair is different than it will be. He gives Devi a pleased little look and he says, “Well! I’d say that went pretty good!”

Devi’s little smile tightens and disappears. She brushes dust from her sleeves. “There’s not gonna be any merger,” she says. “Your side and my side are fundamentally incompatible. You tell your boss--”

Johnny holds up his hands. “Devi, come on. You’re smarter than the rest of those cracker-eating papists. In a situation like this, you’re only cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

A blade Jimmy doesn’t remember seeing before flashes in Devi’s hand, and then she has a knife pointed just at the bob of Johnny’s throat.

“Don’t act like we don’t all know what you do down there,” she says, eyes narrowing to slits. “Cut off my nose. Hah. Your boss is a snake and you’re not any better, Cucuy.”

Johnny takes the tip of the knife between his gloved fingers, and the whole thing explodes into a puff of ash. Devi looks down at the remains, grim but not surprised. The ash shudders and reforms into the shape of Sickness, who scuttles down her arm and crouches on her shoulder. She shakes off her hand and returns it to her pocket.

“If you think I’ve got any warm fuzzy feelings about my job, you’re mistaken,” Johnny says. “No man worships the yolk around his neck.”

“Worship or no worship,” Tenna cuts in, “we’re not buying!”

Johnny looks past Devi, fixing his attention on the rest of them. His eyes pass over Tenna and land on Edgar, sharp with a renewed interest that makes Jimmy’s hackles raise. He knows when somebody wants what’s his. The fact that it’s Johnny only makes him madder.

“Think about it,” Johnny says, all encouraging. “We couldn’t have done what we did here if we weren’t all together for it. Your side and my side are really just two sides of the same coin, you know? There’s just us, all of us hot and squishy and suspended in the relentless void of eternity, one little rowboat on a vast merciless ocean. Sure, we fight from time to time, but when it comes down to it there’s us,” he says, then gesturing over his shoulder with a thumb, he says, “and there’s them.”

When Edgar considers something, his face takes on this delicate, serious little expression. Jimmy is almost convinced that the wrong breath will break him. After a moment, Edgar says, “It does seem like a waste of effort to run two cars when one car would do.”  

The way Johnny grins at Edgar, you’d half expect the earth to snap closed around him like a hidden mouth, trap sprung. But all that happens is Devi sighs tiredly and turns back to Johnny. “Look,” she says, “we’ll talk it over. Guadalupe’s new. He doesn’t know what he’s talking to yet.”

Johnny touches his fingertips to his chest. “You wound me,” he says. And then he flips his fingers out again, a card materialized between the digits. It glints in the darkness exactly like paper shouldn’t. “Talk it over. I’m only ever a call away.”

Devi takes it gingerly. Johnny salutes, steps back, and leaves them to the ruined courtyard. As Jimmy stretches to peer over her shoulder, he can just make out the shape of a C. under her thumb.

“Who, uh, who _does_ he work for,” Edgar asks.  

Devi sighs again, heavier this time. “The devil,” she says, “obviously.”

 

* * *

 

In 1929, the sky rained corpses. On Wall Street, where the fatcats lived, bodies littered the pavement in October like so many leaves. Johnny stood there on the corner and watched them come down, his arms full of charcoal sketches on cheap brown paper, cartoons for a painting he had been trying to convince a man down on South Street to fund. He watched them come down, and he knew that it was all over. He'd never been very successful - bread and water, charcoal pencils and patched boots - but he'd skated by. He'd made a living. Or maybe not a living, but he'd stayed alive. Better to live on his own terms, he'd always thought, better to starve and own himself than die by some factory bell the way his mother had. But this was the end of even that.

As a boy he had survived the great war by being too young and then by being an epileptic, which was a high price to pay for not being melted alive in a trench somewhere. His mother died when he was seventeen, from tuberculosis, as did most of his family over the years. Not him though. Never him. Death was an old friend to Johnny, which probably explained the nature of his work.

Back then, they called Johnny a surrealist; nightmare visions and sublime awakenings, endless landscapes populated by colossal monsters. He'd been banned from the art show the summer before for unchristian themes, at which point it had become much harder to find patrons. He was still trying to get his feet back under him. The painting that had gotten him banned from the art show was a triptych: in the shadow of an elephant graveyard, a man and a shapeless figure, a desperate embrace, a corruption. He didn't know what they had expected of him. You didn't grow up an epileptic catholic in the factory district without developing some sour opinions about cosmic righteousness. They used to tell him it was the Devil who had done it to him. Well, the Devil's done a lot to him, but not _that._

The day that Johnny watched the bodies come down, brown paper tucked under his arm on the street corner, he came home to find the man he sublet from had hung himself. Immediate eviction of all tenants. Most of what he owned had fit in a single suitcase, except for the canvasses, which he had to leave behind. On the sidewalk, in the racket of evening traffic, he saw his future unravel before him. Van Gogh starving in an asylum, Puccini's _La Boheme_ , Kafka's _Hunger Artist_. He went to a bar and got drunk for the first time in his life, had a seizure, hated himself, lost his cartoon somewhere in the mad shuffle. When he closes his eyes in the dark of his room over the Reeds garage, he can still see the sketch. He always liked the sketching better than the painting. Painting was an excruciating experience, the constant going back and forth between one brush and another, second guessing himself, loathing every bad stroke. If he could get paid to just build monsters out of charcoal, he would never have touched another tube of oil in his life. 

The bars were full that night. He wasn't the only one who saw the future coming fast. After the seizure they pushed him out into the alley and locked the door behind him. He sat in the darkness, in the stagnant water and the trash and thought - I'll die in this gutter like a roach, and then what will it matter that I never punched a timecard or got my money in a little brown envelope? Who will care?

"Fuck," he'd said, into his knees, "if that's what it takes, I'll lick the goddamn devil's boots."

"Intriguing offer," the voice at the mouth of the alley had said, "but not exactly what I had in mind."

Johnny will cut his own throat before he ever admits this, but the moment he looked up and saw the Devil himself standing in that alley - the silhouette of curling horns, the sinister magnitude - he felt a lot of different things. Something that made his stomach flip. Not fear though. He's never been afraid of that pompous bastard. 

Then of course, as far as the world was concerned, it was just Juan Diablo who walked down into that alley: mild mannered attorney from Little Spain, devoted husband, community figure. "Johnny," he had said, immaculate in his three piece suit, "how would you like a job?"

Johnny doesn't dream anymore, which is good because if he did he's sure he would see Hell again. God knows how long he spent down there. The things he did. Ghoulish. Mindnumbing. Valet to the Dragon Himself is a little hard to fit on a resume, but it definitely provides work experience. He used to walk the iceless void between worlds to pick up coffee from a French café. He worked the rack for days without rest, sleeves rolled up his arms, gloves shedding blood like rainwater. He took coats for a board meeting held over the pit of eternal torment. 

Another skill that doesn't fit well on a resume is knowing exactly how much suffering a human body can produce, how to crack open a skull and peel back the lobes of the brain in just such a way that a man stays screaming the whole time, but he can do that too. He's felt flesh surging and closing around his wrist as he dug his thumbs into a ribcage so warped and ruined that guessing its gender was a lost cause, and it probably shows the Devil's eye for filling a vacancy that Johnny doesn't even feel any particular way about that. Being the Devil's man is not so dissimilar to working for the Reeds. When Diablo said jump, he jumped.

He guesses he must have proved himself to satisfaction at some point. He started getting vacation days, for one thing. The first time Johnny walked through a block fight on his way to the Opera and came out of it with a kitchen knife stuck in his shoulder from the Cuban kids who didn't like the sound of his accent, he watched the skin knit back together under his hand with impersonal interest. The hole remained in his clothes, but the wound closed itself without so much as a bruise. No one noticed in the riot, which was as brutal and bloody as they always were. He doesn't get seizures anymore. He doesn't get anything.

He supposes he doesn't owe his soul in the way of Dr. Faustus, as a price to be collected at the end of a term. Instead it seems an interminable undeath, a damnation that never sleeps.  He may walk the earth again now, but he finds himself no freer than he was sitting in that alley in 1929, crying into his knees for a cartoon that would never be finished. After that shit in '38, the noose is only tighter, only more like a leash - he is choking under the pull of it -

Johnny was not kidding when he said he had other employers. 

 

* * *

 

Despite the dour ending to the encounter with Johnny, the prospect of seeing whom again has become absolutely terrifying now, everyone around Edgar seems to be in good spirits. Edgar tries to share their enthusiasm. He's happy that the danger is over, and he's happy that Jimmy isn't more beaten up than he already is, but he can't stop thinking about the look in Johnny's eyes. He's never seen his friend like that before--irises so black that they resembled pits, hungry and calculating. Whatever Johnny saw when he looked at Edgar, it wasn't Edgar he was seeing. 

This terrifying creature of the night couldn't possibly be his roommate of almost a year, but who else could it possibly be? He hasn't changed a day, except for that look in his eyes. Did Johnny used to look at him like that? Has he seen that look before? Maybe back when he first came to work for the Reeds, before they really knew each other, maybe back then there was something about him that unnerved Edgar at odd moments, but it's been so long--

Jimmy claps him on the back, lighting up the sore shoulder that just bore his whole human weight, both heavier and more insubstantial than Edgar thought it would be. “Well fuck that mystical shit,” he says. “I’m buying drinks, where’s a decent dive around this place?"

Devi and Tenna share a look. Tenna grins. Devi unwraps her mask in a way that clearly communicates her awareness of how outnumbered she is, and says, "Alright, alright. One drink. Since we earned it."

On the walk there, all of them punch drunk and warmly welcoming around Edgar, Tenna teases Devi about getting drinks from the same club she moonlights at and Devi swears up and down that if they embarrass her in front of Pachito's gang she will disavow all of them forever, and Jimmy demands to know what it means that she's working for the mob, and Edgar tries to quiet the spinning in his head. Even in the ragged end of the Depression, the city is noisy at night. Mostly it's drunks hunkering in the alleys, newspaper and cardboard strung up like a magpie roof, but some of it is quick-footed errand boys with their heads tucked down, dashing from one street to another. Devi leads them into the light and the thumping clamor of a club on a street that still teams with life. When someone swings the door open to stumble out away from the excitement, even from here Edgar can hear the band insisting that It Don't Mean a Thing if it Ain't Got That Swing.

Swing. That takes him back.

Edgar holds his breath at the door, waiting for someone to notice his skin (not as dark as some, but dark enough), but they pass him right through with barely a look. Belatedly, he remembers Tenna. If anyone was going to have a problem here, it would be her first, not him. Tenna just throws a knowing grin at the bouncer as they duck through, following Devi's stiff quick stride. Inside the club-it doesn't have a dancing license, someone will inform him later-the crowd is tired and threadbare but they all clap as hard as they can when the man at the mic takes his bow. It's the end of the night, the set is coming to a close, but the patrons shout and whistle and cajole their performer into one last song. It's a small band, mostly a piano, and a couple instruments that are already being packed up for the night.

The drinks Jimmy buys are all straight shots of irish whiskey, prompting a friendly round of mercilessly ripping the whole concept of Ireland to shreds from the men around the bar. Edgar winces and tries to keep his head down as Jimmy, despite being thoroughly English as far back as anyone might determine, gets belligerent with the regulars. When someone starts shouting, he edges away as best he can.

Yes, now that Edgar really thinks back, those first few weeks with Johnny had a strange cast over them. Johnny’s keen interest in Edgar’s habits, his strange little gifts, deliberate shows of good will--the mark of an earnest room mate, Edgar had thought, of someone who knew as little as Edgar did about sharing a space with another human being. He had been endeared. He had opened up like something soft and insubstantial pouring out across the table.

Johnny, his _friend_ Johnny, made a deal with the devil. Well it’s good job security, he supposes, with contract upfront and all. By why in god’s name would a man who already traded his soul for earthly delights be working as a valet in Long Island? A man like Johnny, he should be holding court in a French salon, writing poetry in a castle in the alps, watching Wagner late into the German night. There has always been something pinned and boxed about Johnny--an insect glassed into a display case--something that beat its wings against the edges of its invisible cage. Perhaps that’s why Edgar believed he understood the man so well. Neither of them, at least he had thought so, had any way out.

The man on the stage, with his dark glasses and dark skin both like Tenna’s, sings _Nice Work if You Can Get It_ to the happy sigh of the audience. He closes his still-trembling hand tight around his glass, and listens to the piano spiral along ahead of the singer. It’s a hopeful song, but they’ve slowed the tempo for the end of the night and there’s some bitter edge to its smile, some kind of sadness that makes all his bruises ache. Jimmy hurt him a bit on the way down, although he’d do it again in a heartbeat-- _had_ done it in a heartbeat, before he knew what he was doing. He’d run so fast he hadn’t even had time to wonder what he would do if he wasn’t fast enough.

With a ruffle of clothing, fixing his tie in a way that made one suspect he’d just been grabbed by it, Jimmy comes up beside him. He doesn’t say anything. Together they watch the stage, Jimmy drinking surprisingly small sips of his whiskey, grey eyes filmed with some strange memory Edgar can neither access nor approach.

The sharp roar of applause seems to cut right through the boy, down through that dreamy haze and into something meaty and raw and twitching with impatience. He knocks back the rest of his glass as the lights go up. “Come on,” he says, “we got a table.”

Evidence suggests Jimmy bought out the rest of the Irish Whiskey, and empty shot glasses line the middle of the table. When asked, Jimmy pulls open his bag to reveal a haphazard scattering of bills from all sorts of different eras, piled like down feathers underneath his wadded rolls of clothes. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that flashing a literal pile of money at them might be in poor taste, or actually dangerous. He pours himself another shot as he explains how he likes to have cash on hand in case of last minute visits to other years because it’s no fun to be in the middle of a party with empty pockets. He’s been stranded like that once before, he tells them with a passing grimace, and he’s not keen to repeat the experience.

Devi and Tenna have eyes the size of dinner plates. Most of the money in that bag hasn’t been minted yet, but even the little that will work here is more--Edgar imagines--than they’re used to seeing in one sitting. More than he is, certainly, and he doesn’t even hang up his hat in the Depression. Edgar himself can’t stop looking over his shoulder, searching for pairs of eyes turned their way, gripped with the anxiety that someone here has seen.

Jimmy scoops up the shot glasses by the handful and starts distributing them around the table. “Don’t feel bad if you can’t keep up,” he says. The pale liquor glints as he pours it, splashing over rims and leaving trails across the already stained tablecloth.

“Oh look,” Devi says, “it’s a dick measuring competition. Tenna?”

Tenna is already leaned forward over the table, hand extended and waiting for her glass. “If you think you can out drink me, you can just try it,” she says, grinning.

Jimmy obliges. “Chinchin,” he says, and throws his head back.

Edgar considers his glass, still the same one he was first given, untouched. Technically he has work tomorrow, but when has that ever really stopped him? He’s not even sure when _tomorrow_ will arrive. He could be gone for days and never be missed. So this is how Jimmy lives, then, rolled by a tide, lost in a wave, champagne bubbles and screaming lungs. It doesn’t feel like escape to Edgar, but in the end he drinks anyway.

Someone in the bar ducks by to talk to Devi while they’re working on their shots, and for a while they all listen with half an ear to Manuel Something-or-Other outline the guest list to a gambling party that Devi is being asked to bounce for. Apparently her job is to wander the tables, looking casual, and scan the hands for one-too many aces, sleeves that seem a bit too full. Manuel is trying to get her to take the boss’s wife home before the night closes.

“We almost never get raided,” Devi informs the table, making some kind of point that Edgar is too far out of the loop to interpret. Manuel rolls his eyes. “Regardless, in this line of business it’s not like I’ve never been arrested.”

“How are you ever going to find a husband like that?” Manuel says.

“Too late for me to be good now,” Devi says, smiling mirthlessly, “I’m a no-good deviant, Manny. A degenerant woman.”  

Jimmy pours them all another round and raises his glass. “I’ll drink to that!” he says.

After a complicated silent conversation with one of the staff, Devi tells him it’s fine, so they pass out the cards from the old pack he’s borrowed from her. They don’t play for money--that would be too much, too brass even for a place like here at an hour like this--but it’s the end of the night, and the vice squad is long in bed. All down the room, patrons are drifting off into night, leaving silver coin tips on their messy tables, and the staff all pause one by one as they pass by. They peer over Edgar’s shoulders, interested in the way he always seems to know when to fold. But Edgar has always known when to fold.

“God damn it!” Jimmy says, “how the fuck do I keep losing?” He throws his cards across the table, revealing the intricate flourish of an ace of spades.

“You never know when to stop,” Devi tells him.

Edgar deals another hand and sheds his jacket.

The kitchen staff howl as Jimmy loses yet again, slamming their hands on the table in consternation and delight, rattling all the empty shot glasses. The chef comes out from the kitchen and shouts at all the staff in a terrifying island accent, banging any too-close shoulders with a wooden spoon. The staff dive for cover, breaking up all around the table, scurrying to finish their work. The chef keeps on waving his spoon, spitting fire and brimstone like a tommy gun, pointed straight at the four of them and their suspect hand-me-down cards. Jimmy says something unrepeatable. Devi’s friend the bouncer manhandles them all out hastily onto the street, shielding them from harm with his considerable bulk. They tumble out.

Tenna is laughing. Jimmy is swearing and kicking the facade of the restaurant, pounding his fist against the brick, threatening god and jesus and the whole heavenly lot with his particular brand of vengeance. Devi hides her smile behind her hand.

Edgar looks up at the sky, into the silver dollar whiteness of the moon. The city he’s spent his whole life in seems so strange, as alien as the twisting thickness of a fairy tale wilderness. He’s part of this, but he isn’t part. He is adrift, unable to find himself without familiar constriction to bind him down.

“Fuck it!” Jimmy shouts, swinging his arm like he’s throwing something at the whole institution. His hand is empty. He’s not really drunk yet, Edgar thinks. He’s just playing it, leaning into a familiar role. But he is a live wire of energy, a light in the dark, burning hot and warm where the moon remains pale and cold. He turns, and his eyes stop on Edgar.

Mankind was born to be tempted. The memory of his offer in the garden, open palm, sends a shiver up Edgar’s spine.

Jimmy crosses the pavement with purpose. He leans into Edgar’s space, not quite touching him at all, and he doesn’t smile. He stares, grey eyes flickering, as if even now Edgar is something that he is eating up one lick at a time. It is all Edgar can do not to offer his throat.

“Grab hold,” Jimmy says, holding up his hand like a torch between them. “I’m not done with you yet.”

Some men know how to say no. Edgar has not had the opportunity to master the skill.

Without looking away, Jimmy calls out to the ladies, “You guys in? Night ain’t over.”

There’s some grumbling, but Edgar cannot hear it over the blood in his ears. When the ladies shuffle over, all suspicious sideways cat walk, Jimmy reaches out and draws them all, in a single moment, into the endless night.

(it is so cold in the endless night, but he can feel in his bones how empty it is, how even ice is shredded and consumed by the perfect silence)

In a dance club with a window looking out onto a half-familiar street, Edgar clasps Jimmy’s shoulder with the hand that isn’t currently intertwined between them.

“Should you really be doing this?” he asks, in a low voice that disappears under the chatter of a sizable crowd.

Jimmy shakes him off, bumping Tenna as he struggles to get his feet under him properly. Tenna and Devi are blinking, owl eyed, at the sudden change of locale. “‘M fine,” Jimmy says, coughing in a way that threatens either vomit or asthma. When Edgar reaches for him again, he thinks he can see the boy’s eyes watering.

Jimmy doesn’t exactly shake him off this time. They linger in a half-touching space, Edgar too afraid to try again but unwilling to let go. “I just need a drink,” Jimmy tells him. “It’s easier to jump when I’m hammered.”

Edgar thinks of the inevitable jump back. He’s not eager to try it. “Where are we?” he asks.

The music that is bouncing along the floor to reach them crackles just a little bit, with a hollow canned sound that tells him it’s no use looking for a live band. It’s awfully loud for a record though. Awfully clear too.

Jimmy lifts his head, like a dog sniffing out a scent, and says, “Sixty-six, maybe.” A grin slices through his visible nausea, cutting it like butter. “Told you I’d get you to Greenwich Village.”

Unlike some of the staff, who use their short-cut weekends to bleed away their troubles in a whirl of city lights and cosmopolitan drinks, Edgar has never been to a dancing club before. When would he have? The room thrums with human energy, hot with too many bodies, trashy and well loved and sharp around the edges with the scent of some kind of desperation.

“If you see another one of me,” Jimmy is saying, “hit the deck but don’t worry too much. I’ve been here a lot, there’s no point in keeping a day calendar. Should be a closed loop anyway.”

The way the dancers move out on the floor is weirdly lonely, none of the calculated ease of the swing he sometimes sees on _Bandstand_ when Milly’s daughter turns on the parlor tv while she cleans. It dawns on him that when the dancers come together, furtive and never quite synchronized, it is always men coming together with men.

He has to sit down.

Jimmy is watching him with an expectant hunger, tie twisted loose around his rumpled dress shirt, sleeves rolled up around his forearms sometime in the last hour. Where did his jacket go? He’s transformed by the helter-skelter vibrancy of this club, by his own abandon, and Edgar swallows thickly.

“I didn’t know places like this existed,” he says quietly.

“Like this?” Jimmy says. “They don’t. Not yet.” He pops the top button of his shirt, exposing just the whisper of a collarbone below the starched edges. “If you know a guy who knows a guy, you can get into Adrian’s ballroom a couple times a year, though. That’s a hell of a ride.”

Sweat is already starting to prickle on the back of Edgar’s neck. He toys with the edges of his own dress shirt, rough thread under his fingers, and contemplates rolling them up as well.  

Jimmy bends down to him, a hand on his hip, teeth glinting under his curled back lip. “Tell you what,” he says, “if you can out drink me, I’ll get you an invite.”

The idea of Edgar in some ballroom on the upper east side, surrounded by pretty ravenous anglo boys like Jimmy, eating caviar off a silver plate before god knows what kind of orgy--Edgar almost has to laugh at the sheer ludicrousness of it. He does smile. Of course it’ll never happen, regardless of what Jimmy says. “You might not want to bite off more than you can chew,” he answers, instead.

Jimmy’s delight is a shark’s satisfaction, pupil black eyes and jagged teeth. He pulls back, digs a bill out of his bag, and says, “Jamison or Maker’s Mark?”

Edgar tells him Maker’s Mark, and then watches him sway through the crowd, a little bit tipsy and a little bit coquettish, and Edgar thinks of birds that pretend to have broken wings, hopping along the grass with their irresistible limp. The bird knows what the fox does not. This knowledge seems precious and dangerous, volatile like gasoline soaking his clothes.  

There are other eyes following Jimmy’s path through the crowd, he realizes. Edgar’s stomach flips. How many strangers would like to know the sharp killing things that the wounded wing hides, to hear the sound of this boy’s breath in the darkness, the way Edgar has but also _not_ the way Edgar has. His hand tightens around his cuff, twisting the fabric until the button thread creaks. Quickly, he releases it and goes about unbuttoning them both, eyes fixed firmly down on his work.

Jimmy comes back with a bottle again, but this time no cups to speak of. He offers the bourbon like a dare. When the glass touches Edgar’s lips, it seems to evaporate off his dry tongue before it can touch his throat. Jimmy licks his lips, maybe deliberately. Gasoline, Edgar thinks. I’m drinking gasoline, after all.

They trade swigs from the bottle, hung back at the edge of the room as quick-burning friday night passion twists and spins ahead of them. None of these moves are anything Edgar has ever seen. One of the nearby dancers winks at Edgar, as he passes, and Jimmy yanks the bottle out of Edgar’s hand to take an scowling swig. Then he glances down at Edgar’s rolled sleeves.

“You better just take that off,” Jimmy says.

Edgar blinks. “My shirt? Why?”

Jimmy shrugs, the half empty Maker’s Mark sloshing. “You got an undershirt on, right?” he says.

Edgar replies that he does.

The way the boy fixes his eye on Edgar’s bicep, Edgar has to look down too just to make sure it’s not bleeding or anything. Jimmy flicks his finger, an imperious wordless demand. And Edgar, to his own shaking dismay, reaches for the button at his throat.

When the whole thing has been stripped off, Jimmy takes it and folds it into a haphazard ball, and shoves it into his bag. It’s going to need a few solid minutes with an iron after this escapade. The air is cooler on Edgar’s exposed shoulders, it’s true, but his body is pumping gasoline fumes through his veins like it’s blood, and he is one stray cigarette away from immolation.

Tenna pops up right in his line of vision, breaking the dangerous enchantment for a blessed moment. She’s got an empty glass in her hand, and without thinking too much about it, Edgar pours her a drink.

“Next time how about a warning?” she says to Jimmy, as she gives Edgar an appreciative cheek-pinch. It kind of stings. He has no idea what to do with this gesture.

Jimmy shrugs, mean pleasure curving just the shadow of his lips. “Don’t be a baby,” he says.

Tenna looks him up and down, and she points at him with the pinky of the hand holding her glass. “Where was your jacket, Esmoquin?” she says. “You went somewhere, didn’t you?”

Guilt crawls over Edgar like the too-tight squeeze of a shirt that doesn’t quite fit across your shoulders. This isn’t their fight, he knows it isn’t, how could it be? And still, Devi’s elegant, unspoken gratitude, Jimmy’s crowing satisfaction--how often does anyone ever get to see Jimmy honestly satisfied?--they make it hard to admit that he never wanted to come back, never _meant_ to come back. If it wasn’t for the borrowed deck, he never would have.

There is an order to everything, and everything in its order. Turn, turn, the psalm goes, all things in their season. Edgar has always understood without needing to be told. The loose bolt breaks the machine.

“Made a mistake,” Jimmy says. “Missed a jump. It’s fine. We’re here now, aren’t we?”

Tenna smiles at him. “You better think hard about which side you’re on!” she says. “I’ll fight for me and mine, and you don’t wanna be standing in the middle of that catfight when it goes down.”

She knocks back her drink, and then from Edgar’s frozen hand, tips herself out another shot.

Jimmy watches her leave them, blank-faced, and then he mutters, “I swear I’m actually starting to wonder if every woman I meet is out to kill me.”

Edgar hides his expression behind the bottle. “Wouldn’t your sister be put out if Tenna got to you first?”

It startles a laugh out of Jimmy, who sags into the wall and looks up as if at heaven, although Edgar doubts it. At the front of the room, a woman climbs up on a chair and shouts something at the crowd too far away to be heard, but the reaction is deafening. Cheers and hoots, catcalls. On second look, is that a woman? Edgar doesn’t think so.

“Bottoms up,” Jimmy says. “They’re gonna do a show.”

Jimmy drinks like someone who’s been taking on drink for years, like a submarine with a blown porthole, and with more than half the bourbon gone already he’d probably be dancing circles around anyone else at this point. Edgar just smiles to himself as Jimmy puffs up his chest and takes showy deep drinks, all tough guy machismo and wiping wet from his lips with the back of his hand.

The show is really just a couple queens singing in a passable harmony as the crowd shouts along at the right places. The one who was up on the chair bows and winks and before Edgar knows what’s happened, he’s invested in the performance too. It’s not the first time he’s heard about something like this, but it’s certainly the first time with this kind of relentless joy. It’s not at all what he pictured, on the rare occasion that a snide comment had come up in passing around the laundry house. Beside him, Jimmy whoops and whistles with the rest of them.

By the end of it, Edgar is pleasantly soft with drink and laughter, the world just beginning to go unfocused around him. He steps forward and claps with the rest of them when the show finishes, at the overdone curtseys and blown kisses.

Jimmy takes his fingers out of his lips from his wolf-whistle, licks the spit off his pinky, and says, “You wanna meet her?”

It is unfair to expect Edgar to answer any sort of question after being blindsided by a gesture like that, and so when he nods it isn’t so much a _yes_ as an automatic response. Regardless, when Jimmy marches up to the front, Edgar follows. That, too, is automatic.

Jimmy finds room for them. “You’re gonna come put on a show like that for my friends, aren’t you?” he says, swooping in to the conversation which has just paused for breath around the first queen, the one who was on the chair. She has a shawl around her shoulders despite the heat inside the building, and she bops Jimmy’s shoulder with the back of her gloved hand, the perfect parody of an opera star.

“You gonna come perform for _my_ friends?” she asks, raising one eyebrow.

“Name the place,” Jimmy purrs. And then, like it’s the most natural thing in the world, he loops an arm around Edgar’s shoulder and pulls him in. “My friend was just saying how much he liked the song. How do you think we could get him up on the stage like you ladies?”

The queen switches her attention to Edgar, and Edgar absolutely burns with embarrassment. Taking off his shirt was an ill-advised idea.

“You’re a broad-shouldered son of a bitch,” she says, causing Edgar to die a little bit on the inside. “Something with crinoline to balance out the hips, if you don’t mind being a bit old fashioned.” She casts a quick look at Jimmy. “He seems sweet. You sure you want to put a sweet thing like that out on these mean streets?”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

“What about you? There’ll be a walk later tonight, I think Deline’s got something in your size.”

Out of all the supernatural peril that Edgar has been witness to tonight, the flare of unchecked enthusiasm on Jimmy’s face at that moment is the thing that most fills Edgar with the desire to turn and bolt. This can’t end anywhere good. Before the conversation can go any further off the rails, though, the queen spots something or someone on the other side of them and straightens up.

“We’ll talk later,” she says, but as she squeezes between them to leave, she leans into Jimmy’s ear and says, “I’ll talk to Deline for you, darling. Pop back by.”

As the room falls back to chatter Jimmy plucks the forgotten bourbon out of Edgar’s hand and pauses, regarding its low tide with a wrinkled nose. “How are you not stumbling by now?” he says. “You’ve drunk at least as much as me by now.”

“You’re not stumbling either,” Edgar points out.

Jimmy raises a finger, like he’s about to argue, but all he does is take a deep, deep drink instead. “Bullshit,” he gasps, as the glass pops free of his mouth. “We’re gonna fix this.”

At the bar, Devi is leaning back against the counter and listening to a woman in a broad-shouldered motorcycle jacket, nodding along periodically with a sharp look in her eye. As Edgar and Jimmy pass her, she shoots them an appraising look and then immediately loses interest. She seems pretty popular, from the way other women around the room keep giving her quick thoughtful glances.

Jimmy thunks down two shot glasses on either side of the bourbon, taking up a chunk of bar space without apology.

“Fast as you can,” he says, leaning forward into it like he can’t wait to ruin himself, and if he’s allowed to, Edgar too. “Don’t pussyfoot around.”

Edgar looks down. Well, he’s in this deep already isn’t he?

 

* * *

 

Todd is almost vibrating with nervous energy when he pulls up to the Inn, not at all happy about the prospect of crowds or strangers or _police_ , there will absolutely be police and he _hates_ police, why does there always have to be police?

No one really looks at him as he comes in, thank goodness. He sticks to the wall and skitters around the dance floor. The bar. He’s looking for the bar. And he’s looking for--oh, okay, that was easy.

He’d know them just from the sound of the other patrons shouting at them. It sounds like encouragement though? As he gets closer he can see two pairs of hands pounding back shots from an almost-empty bottle of Maker’s Mark on the bartop. Todd sighs. It’s going to be one of those nights.

Desperately wishing he was home in his nice safe bed, Todd makes his way over to the bar.

Mr. James, always a little scary, is terrifying like this, with his whole skinny body leaned into the scene like a bug getting ready to eat her mate. Unfortunately Todd has seen this happen, in the garden at the Reeds manor once, when he was leaning in to smell the flowers and his nose got within swiping distance of a very hungry lady mantis. He cried. He used to cry a lot, at little things, before he started having bigger things to cry about.

As Mr. James slams his glass down again, and over the very loud noises of encouragement, Todd leans in and says, “Excuse me, Mr. James, I’m supposed to drive you home--”

James turns and gives him a bleary stare. “Who the fuck are you, shrimp?”

Todd squeezes his thumbs together. He tries to remember what he was told to say, but it all came at him in such a rush and he _knows_ it’s because he’s bad at saying no to things that happen fast. The whole conversation this morning is a blur. He cannot remember for the _life_ of him.

“I’m supposed to drive you home,” he says again, “you’re going to get in trouble if you stay here…”

“Are you even old enough to get in this place?” James demands, even as he pours himself the last drop of alcohol and knocks it back without so much as a wince.

If Todd wasn’t terrified before, he sure is now. Alcohol is gross.

“I’m eighteen,” he mumbles.

James squints at him, and then he snatches the glass out of his friend’s hand, mid-drink. He pushes it into Todd’s chest. “Fuck yes,” he says, “have one on me kiddo.”

Todd takes it only because he’s afraid James may let it go and then it’ll break on the floor and then they’ll all get thrown out in the alley with the rats and the wolves. There aren’t wolves in New York City but if there _were_ any wolves in New York City, which he knows there aren’t but look, if there were, they would absolutely come for Todd first, so he takes the glass.

“I don’t drink,” Todd says, tremulously.

“Prohibition’s over, kid,” James says, like that has anything to do with it.

The friend leans forward, pushing his glasses up on his nose. “Jimmy,” he says, “who’s this?”

James whips his head around. “Yeah,” he says, “who are you?”

Under the twin expectant gazes, surrounded by strangers and alcohol and the impending threat of police--he hasn’t forgotten the police--and the whole weight of the time-space continuum which he has _never_ understood, Todd just whines, “Squeeeeeee….”

James stares at him. Then James collapses back into his chair. “Alright,” he says, “there you go, I guess.”

A dark-skinned woman with a pink lipstick mark on her cheek leans into the conversation. “Who’s this?” she asks.

As James and Edgar both open their mouths to answer, the overhead lights begin to flash. The reaction from the crowd is instantaneous--Todd can smell their fear like the sour tang of sweat in the air, a panicked stampede energy that makes his hands shake with anxiety.

“What’s going on?” says a fourth voice, as a tall woman muscles her way into the huddle.

“Police raid,” James says. “Don’t worry, they’ll be open again in an hour. It’s a liquor license thing.”

Todd is slowly pressing himself flat against the bar counter, tongue almost numb now with fear. He can’t afford to get thrown in the paddy wagon, first of all he thinks he’ll die if he has to spend a night in central holding with all the crazy street drunks and the angry drug addicts, but also that’s _Pepito’s_ car he’s borrowed, what if it gets stolen? Dented? Thrown up on?!

He knew he shouldn’t have let himself be talked into this! Why can’t he be better at telling people no!

Edgar says, “If it’s a liquor license problem… should we be worried about having bought drinks?”

“Or about Tenna’s face,” one woman says, pointing a thumb over at the pink mark Todd noticed earlier.

“If it’s the vice squad,” the other woman says, thoughtfully, “and this is a club full of deviants and queers, shouldn’t we all be worried?”

The door slams open as someone with a bullhorn shouts for everyone to put their hands up. The four of them exchange a look over Todd’s head.

“Fuck it,” James says, and grabs both Edgar and, to his horror, Todd by the shoulder. “Let’s blow this joint.”

The warm friendly solidness of reality tears away into an abyss so perfectly black that all Todd can see is spots of red blinking out of his vision and, worse, the shape of something enormous far below him, something impossible, all its dragon scale claws and eyes and fish-tail edges curled into a monstrosity that would blot out the sun if any sun could exist here.

Todd has never seen the Cold Place before, and by every devil in the hosts of Hell, he desperately wishes it could have stayed that way.

 

* * *

 

The riot of light and sound in the big ballroom was more than willing to swallow up five sudden visitors, just as it had swallowed up all the arrivals who came before. It had taken in angry glittering girls with cigarettes pinned between their teeth, girls with short hair and long hair but mostly short, men with old limps and boys without them, all the rich and reluctant gaiety of a world that hadn’t quite shaken off the horror of war.

“Jazz,” one of the five says, looking down the staircase towards the band that plows on without any notice for the crowd that comes and goes below it.

A girl comes trotting up the stairs, a martini perfectly balanced in her hand, not a drop lost on the ascent. It’s her party, although it’s on her boyfriend’s dime, and she is very keen to get everyone in the right place. She is a big believer in order, although it’s not in any way the order that her parents’ generation prescribes to.

“You must be Gwish’s guests,” she says, hustling up to them. “Typical, leaves me to do the meet and greet while she’s off petting some square from uptown. My god man, who took your shirt?”

Edgar opens his mouth to answer, but she carries on right over him. “You’re with me,” she says, “everybody else, say hi to Tony at the bar and tell him Harrie sent you, he’ll get you orientated. You look like you got run over by the bootlegger wagon, cat, have you been out at some hole in the wall I should know about?”

Edgar, thoroughly dazed now from the many many drinks and the unnerving leap through time and space, and mixing up two conversations in his memory at once, says, “There was some talk of finding me a dress.”

Harrie lights up. In her boudoir there are several dresses which she would like to be wearing right now, except for the unfortunate fact that she only has one body with which to display them. She is a tall woman--handsome, she’s been called, by those who know better than to imply otherwise--and she is already calculating how sleeveless a sleeveless dress would have to be in order to accommodate shoulders like that. She takes Edgar by the arm, dragging him up the steps before his stumbling feet can totally catch up with her quick pace.

“Danny’ll love this,” she says, effortlessly balancing his weight as she goes. “He’s a real daisy, he’ll just howl if he gets a look at a boy like you.”

Edgar has no idea what she’s talking about, but he’s sufficiently drunk enough that he’s willing to humor her. Why go to the trouble of being a stick in the mud now? Anyway, he thinks fuzzily, maybe it’ll make Jimmy laugh. A real laugh, even. That’s a rare enough gem that he would do any number of stupid things to hear it again.

Harrie goes through her party clothes in the dim light of the dressing room. She’s already wearing the low-backed number with the flouncy skirt, but the beaded dress--she checks the straps and the hanging cut of the underarms, more or less satisfied. It’ll look tight on him, but that’s alright. It’s just for a lark.

“Here,” she says, “strip those off. Do you think we should go for garters?”

Edgar shifts uneasily, and then catches himself at the last minute against the wall. He doesn’t really want to undress in front of a lady, even if she doesn’t seem to think much of it. He really didn’t get this far ahead.

Harrie snaps her fingers. “Off, off,” she says. “Oh, underwear too. I’m not letting you stuff those baggy things under this dress.”

Edgar pauses with the belt undone in his hands. “Ma’am,” he says, helplessly. “You can’t really mean…”

“Come on,” Harrie says, and single handedly unloops the belt herself. “Gird your loins, hombre.”

As a concession to his modesty (how darling, Harrie thinks, although awfully old fashioned), they slip the dress on over the underwear and then wriggle those off underneath. Then, of course, there’s the problem of the shoes--he cannot wear those ones, what _ever_ they may be, but in no world does she have heels that will fit a man. She considers this for a moment. “Alright,” she says, “we can at least get some hose on you, so it’s not so obvious that you’re barefoot.”

The hip garters won’t work for him, but she finds a pair of old hose with a run in them and cinches them around his thighs, and that should hold as long as he doesn’t want to dance in it. He can’t be much of a dancer in his condition, although she knows from experience that the spirit is often willing long after the flesh is inebriated. At long last, the look is perfect. Harrie steps back and congratulates herself.

Edgar is watching himself in the mirror, half convinced that he’s watching a stranger. Another queen from the Greenwich bar? But all those types had curly perfect feminine hair, and Edgar is still just… Edgar. He supposes it must be him, after all.

“Hotsy totsie,” Harrie says, and smacks her hands together. “Lets show you off, babe.”

Harrie’s dress is heavy over his hips, shifting forward with every step like it has a life of its own, like it’s eager to be seen and admired and it’s dragging him out into the light. The silk is strange over his knees, and the garter bands--it’s all such a weird experience that he can’t pay attention to the hall or the stairs or anything else really until suddenly he is standing in the ballroom, Harrie making a big show of clinging to his elbow but absolutely holding him upright, for which he is grateful. He blinks up at the crystalline light of the chandelier.

Harrie’s friends shout from the chaise lounges along the darker, more intimate side of the room, waving them over. They are all a bunch of reckless young faces, perfectly willing to accept something that is both a joke and not quite a joke, and they are delighted with Edgar. He is charmingly quiet, exotically dark for their usual crowd, and perfectly delicate with his broad shoulders and corded biceps. They pour him cocktails he’s never heard of and address him like a showgirl, asking him about his routine and a million other questions that he doesn’t know how to answer. His head spins with all of it. He is taking a drink to avoid answering another incomprehensible question when he looks up, and he meets Jimmy’s eyes.

 

* * *

 

This is what Jimmy sees: at the center of a magpie crowd, like a regent presiding over court, Edgar holds a martini glass in one of his hands. Everything about him is downward motion, the dip of the neckline, the pattern, the place where the heavy beads give way to loose hanging silk. It kills. Jimmy is strangled by the urge to run his fingers over the black and white beads that overlap to form their promising downward Vs, down to the dropped waist with the glittering skirt rucked up over one hip, maybe on accident, so that anyone who wants to can see the glinting top of the garter.

“Tenna,” he says, “get me a double while you’re up there. Maybe--maybe a triple.”

Jimmy isn’t feeling much more oriented than any of them, except maybe Squee the Teetotaler who is currently petting one of the guest’s dogs out on the portico, and you can blame that if you like for the way he falls into Edgar’s lap, knocking aside the martini glass to perch himself on the man’s knee. Someone rescues the glass before it goes over, which Jimmy is only grateful for because it would be a real waste of whatever convinced Edgar to put this outfit on.

The beads are cool under his fingers, but what he really want to touch is the skin under it. He is aware of the people all around him, watching, and while that would stop some people, probably, it just makes him more reckless, more determined. He slides his fingertips under the strap of the dress, palm flat against a pectoral.

“Are you always like this at parties?” Jimmy asks.

Edgar looks up at him with that almost flat expression from the kitchen, weeks ago, the look that Jimmy can’t forget--disinterest betrayed by his unblinking black eyes, his slightly parted lips, his tongue tracing the rim of his teeth--and Jimmy’s heart thrills viciously. This moment is _his_ now, this belongs to him. In his whole vision of the world, with its out-of-focus edges and swirling background textures, Edgar is the only thing coming to him clearly.

“I’ve never been invited to parties,” Edgar manages.

One of the guests Jimmy doesn’t care about says something in French, and everyone laughs. Jimmy grins too. He swings up to his feet, flicking dust he can’t see off his sleeve, and holds out his hand. Anything he can do to make Edgar look up at him like that again, to make him feel like a king and a god and a beast bearing down on a wounded creature, all of that in a drunken haze, he’ll do it. In this boiling flood, he doesn’t care what he may crush in his clinging child hands. He wants to tear this moment open to the bare flesh, to the thumping bird heart, and touch the untouchable thing.

Edgar’s hand closes around his hand, tight, tighter than it needs to be, and-

Tenna bumps her hip into his, passing him his glass. When he spares her a glance, she’s chewing on a frown.

“You guys look like you’re having fun,” she says, taking a sip of her red-glowing wine. “Congrats. I keep getting mistaken for a maid.”

Edgar winces. Jimmy looks between them for a moment, and if he’s letting himself be distracted it’s only because Tenna is one of his now, too. Even if she did threaten him earlier. That’s fine, that’s just the price of doing business sometimes. It all seems so simple right now.

“Let’s ditch this place, then,” he says, as he waves Devi over, squinting through the crowd to find her at the edge of the show. That just leaves…. Squee. Who he doesn’t much give a fuck about, but if he leaves the kid here who knows what dumbfuck shit will go down in the timeline.

“My pants,” Edgar points out, as Jimmy is pushing them all out towards the portico. Jimmy ignores him. What does Edgar need pants for, anyways, with a skirt like that? It was Jimmy’s idea, the drag thing, and Edgar went and did it, and what else can that mean but that Edgar did it for _him_? When they get done with this--when they get done with--skirts and stockings, is Edgar wearing a slip under that thing is Edgar wearing--

It takes a second of fumbling but Jimmy whistles, successfully, and both Squee and the wolfhound out there snap upright to look at him.

“Load the fuck up,” Jimmy says, slinging his arm around Edgar’s bare shoulder, which is firm and hot in the cool spring air, enough to make him wish he were drunker. At his side, Devi sighs and holds a hand out to Squee, who trots over in a panic like he thinks he’s about to get ditched in mid-stream. Tenna grabs Edgar and flips off someone through the window with a cheerful middle finger, as Jimmy drags them all back with a shudder into

 

-rkthedarkthe, the,

 

and comes up coughing from the millionth jump of the night, it feels like. The world is spinning around him, but they’re back in the sixties on maybe the same night, maybe a different night, he’s not as good at aiming when he’s lost and being drunk always makes him feel lost, drifting in a familiar world torn up from the stuffing in an unrecognizable wreckage, but anyway the raid is over and the drink is flowing again. Someone’s cracked the wall safe with the extra liquor and they’re back to plunging drinks through the water trough behind the bar to rinse the beer out of the bottoms, like they always are.

Some of the drag queens are back, even after the raid earlier, determined to finish out the night like the screaming angry things they are behind that pastel mock prettiness. Jimmy loves that. He loves that, because he is also screaming and angry and he can’t figure out why _everyone_ isn’t, christ he’s thirsty, can he get a coke here or what.

The dance floor has a hole in the middle, just the right size for him. Instead of finding a drink, he pulls Edgar out into the scene despite protests that he doesn’t know how to dance and all that other stuff that Edgar _would_ say, wouldn’t he. He really cannot dance though, it turns out. Well that’s fine too. A couple of the drag queens come up to inspect Edgar’s outfit, it’s hard to catch what they say about it but it seems like they’re willing to let it pass with minimal necessary snickering because it’s such a retro look, I remember my mother’s old photos, they all had that short hair too didn’t they, and Jimmy is literally this close to telling them all where they got it when

Jesus _Fuck_ ,

 

* * *

 

Edgar rolls up the bottom of his skirt to show someone called Deline how the garters attach around the thigh, just above the hem of the half-see-through fabric. He misjudges the distance, pulls too high, and in the blink of inner thigh that flashes, he can feel Jimmy stiffen against his hip like a pull-cord doll snapped tight. In the feathery shadow of the skirt, he hopes he didn’t just show what he thought he did but, then, if he didn’t then

He looks up at Jimmy. He forgets how to breathe. He knew at least he thought he knew but he wasn’t sure or maybe he was sure it just seemed so impossible, it seemed like asking too much, how dare he ask, how dare he presume?

He lets the skirt drop. When Deline starts to crack a joke, he realizes he has forgotten everything except the all-consuming hunger of Jimmy’s frozen stare.

It’s Devi who comes crashing through, then, a platter of shots in her hands all different colors, saying they won’t sell her another full bottle but she did manage to wrangle these up, and she says it in this bored way but Edgar’s heart hurts a little bit for it, he thinks she is a very lonely person for all that she insists she prefers being alone. It’s easy to prefer being alone when there’s hardly anyone to be together with, and Tenna loves her but Tenna can’t be her everything—there are things that Tenna cannot, will not understand.

Edgar takes one from the platter and looks up at her.

“To your health,” she says, with a smirk that doesn’t mean anything except she thinks she should have it on. So Edgar

drinks -

Edgar is a couple years younger, sitting at the kitchen table playing solitaire against himself as he works his way through a bottle of wine purchased during one of his few precious hours off. It’s hard to get off the Reeds property before the stores close out here, and he never knows when his next window of opportunity may be. He is pouring another round into a chipped cup when Johnny stamps through the door, and they both freeze, two deer caught in the lanterns of each other’s startled gaze. The wine sits between them, red as the fire that may burn this house down. Good evening, Johnny says, after a moment. I’ve been informed these are now my quarters.

They are trying to swing dance in the little dance floor of the club in Greenwich Village, which is a losing battle but it makes the drag queens clap and howl with laughter and for now that’s good enough, Edgar has never been someone who could make other people laugh before, but he thinks he, he thinks he likes it. Someone offers him another shot and he -

drinks -

Edgar is seventeen, and he is holding the flask that Mickey the gardner handed him hours earlier as he shook hands at the front of the church beside his wilted mother. He has driven Tess Reeds to and from Ford Headquarters, as well as several other stops along the way back. Now he stands in the unlit foyer of the loft above the garage, something hard and strong and clear sloshing against the empty space in his hand. Behind the closed door of his parents’ room, now his mother’s only, the light is off. He unscrews the top of the flask, and he takes a foul burning taste of moonshine.

A stranger in the little club in Greenwich Village spins himself into Edgar’s arms and Edgar may not know much but he’s strong enough and drunk enough and he dips them, a tango dip like his father used to dance with his mother on the odd night that they were both free and the radio played something jazzy that reminded them of a long time ago, Spanish nights lost long before he was born. The man in his arms--it is a man--gasps with delight, and Edgar reels him back up, hard-used muscles straining pleasantly. Someone passes him a drink and he -

drinks -

Edgar is sixteen. He is sharing a bottle of cheap white wine fetched from the Sangria station with a boy who works for one of the guests, someone braver than he is and more reckless, just as willing to close his fingers around a bottle of stolen property as he is willing to close his lips around Edgar’s wine-wet fingers. The boy watches him the whole time. They never talk about it. Not in the garden, and certainly not later in the oil-smelling darkness below the garage loft, even their ragged breaths perfectly, perfectly quiet.

Somehow the sweet kid with the big eyes has ended up holding the cash bag, a perfect little designated driver, and although he’s technically and adult--only a year younger than Jimmy--Edgar can’t help but think of him as a kid. In an absent gesture of drunken fondness, Edgar ruffles the kid’s hair. He wants to linger in this moment, the innocence of it, the way the kid almost sags in relief at the realization that nothing bad is going to happen here, but then Jimmy is sweeping him up like a whirlwind into the back alley, somehow, ever the agent of chaos.

Jimmy pushes something into Edgar’s hand. Some kind of cloth? He looks up just in time to see Jimmy grabbing the back of his collar and ripping the whole thing over his head. Immediately Edgar whirls to face the other way.

“Deline found me a dress after all,” he says, muffled, and then white linen lands half over Edgar’s shoulder. “Can’t let you have all the fun.”

Edgar stays very, very still, as more cloth lands in the general direction of his arms. He can hear the heavy breaths as Jimmy works his way out of his clothing, the soft ruffle, a hundred little thrilling terrifying sounds that promise but dare not deliver -

Jimmy is heavy and hot against his back as he reaches down over Edgar’s shoulder and digs up Deline’s black dress. A huff. The solid press of bare skin. Edgar doesn’t dare breathe. Jimmy’s hand cups the back of Edgar’s head, at least half for balance, and his fingers trace shivers through the soft short undercut. That feels both incidental and possessive, an ownership and a dismissal, and how is he supposed to, to,

The air rushes in as Jimmy pulls away. It’s over in an instant, and then Jimmy is tapping him on the shoulder to get him back around. Edgar clutches his piles of clothes to his chest as he turns. They are sharing a strange moment, stranger than the accidental flash of thigh, stranger maybe than the night they spent talking in the darkness. It’s not because of the dresses, at least, not in the literal sense.

The thing that strikes Edgar is how much Jimmy always looks like Jimmy. Even with the silhouette changed, even with the pearls, every angle and flippant gesture is all, entirely, Jimmy.

“There,” he says, planting his hands on his hips, where the skirt sways away from him, “Now we match.”

They don’t really, but Edgar doesn’t argue.

Jimmy snaps his fingers, an idea lighting up his face. “We can go further,” he says, “we’re halfway there anyhow - I bet I could find us something even _better -”_

Edgar is thinking of the way Jimmy has been coughing after the last few jumps, and of the ice that seems to be crystallizing in his bones each time they pass through the endless night, but when Jimmy scoops him into his grasp Edgar doesn’t have the time to protest.

 

* * *

 

In San Francisco 1984 they have no money but it doesn’t matter because someone is celebrating good news from back east and they’re buying anyone in a dress a round of drinks, even Edgar and Jimmy who are neither one of them made up the way the queens here are, with their high eyebrows and their peacock flashing eyeshadow in shades Edgar didn’t even know eyeshadow could _come_ ,

The laughing bartender pushes the shot glass in front of Edgar and explains that it’s called a Blowjob because you can’t use your hands, d’you see, you’ve gotta use your mouth honey, and it’s too late for Jimmy to try because he’s already thrown back his shot before they could get to the explanation.

Edgar contemplates the glass for a moment. It doesn’t seem so hard. He plants his hands on the bartop, bends down, and catches the full circumference in his lips. The shot goes down sweet as he flips his head back, throat working, tongue against teeth. He spits the glass out into his hand and finds Jimmy staring at him agape, mouth actually hanging open, and all at once Edgar is dizzy with what he’s done. He holds the glass in his hand, white knuckled, and he is on fire.

 

 

 

In 1995 in a club strung with bad black velvet, a girl dripping black from eyes painted like an egyptian goddess tells Jimmy he looks like he’s never _even_ worn a dress before, and she takes merciful pity on him, out of the goodness of her heart she says, and does his makeup for him.

The Jimmy that surfaces from that purgatory of the soul is black with khol and so beautiful that for a moment it takes Edgar’s breath away

 

 

 

In San Francisco in 1979, a man who looks a little like Edgar announces the opening of the first ever club of its kind, and they whirl in the borrowed happiness of the moment, riding the success of a story they have no way of knowing, but someone out there is happy and that’s enough, for this moment it is enough, they all drink to the health of Esta Noche

 

 

 

In 1946 in New Orleans a man the waiter calls Tennessee kisses Edgar full on the mouth as the clock shouts the new year, 1947,

 

 

 

In 1937 they wheeze and laugh with shock as they land bare-armed in a chilly christmas street, where carolers are stumbling over themselves and shouting tunelessly into their flasks, and they can stand the cold only just long enough to see the shape of someone who looks like Tess--her hair knotted up severely behind her ears, fur coat dusted with snowflakes--carrying an old-fashioned painter’s kit under her shoulder as she marches through the flurries, a big red bow tied defiantly to the corner.

 

 

in -- in --

 

 

 

“Burning for the, the ancient heavenly connection to the s--to the starry dynamo,” says the poet, stumbling and misremembering, “in the machinery of night--in the machinery of--”

 

 

 

Look at me look at me look at me

Edgar spins and the skirt flies out, catching the light, he’ll regret it when he comes to a stop but for the white hot flare of an instant it is worth it to catch the light he has never caught the light before, Master Reeds keep your eyes on me

 

 

 

Someone convinced Todd to drink a pineapple drink with a suggestive name and he keeled over almost immediately so - they’re back in ‘66 or whenever they were when Deline loaned Jimmy the dress - the bartender shouts that they don’t have to go home but they can’t - Jimmy’s bag is stuffed with clothing, good thing they used up so many bills -

Jimmy’s teeth are chattering and Edgar reaches out to touch his cheek, to warm him the way he should be warmed, and wishes he didn’t feel the need to take so many risks. Jimmy, so eager to tear himself apart, why are you so eager to tear yourself apart?

Feels good, Jimmy says

In the park flowers are blooming, almost invisible against the moonless sky, and Devi stands framed against it all at the crest of a little hill, her eyes on the darkness, as she tells him

“If I could have been an artist, you know-” her long downcurved nose slices the sky as she looks up, “-but a girl’s gotta eat, and Harlem’s golden age is a long time behind us.”

Todd comes to on a park bench and demands to be taken back to his car, which is not his car but is certainly his responsibility, and Edgar feels bad for him especially now that he’s starting to come down, he is coming down, isn’t he?

They’re a few blocks from the bar, which is quiet now, a strange little parade of strange little people making their way to the only parking space Todd could find on a busy saturday night. Edgar sympathizes. It’s hard enough at 8 am on a weekday, in fact it’s the bane of his existence. Todd practically has to be carried by the others, and they stop on the street to try and wake him up again. They all agree that none of them have ever seen such an incredible lightweight before.

The gritty press of brick scrapes Edgar’s shoulders as he looks out onto the street, the shapes of his cohort bent with laughter, cut-out shadow art on a twilight sky. Sighing mouths, midsummer, twilight in New York - in his mind the lyrics of _Moonlight in Vermont_ are lazily swirling and reforming.

Even for an observer, the end of a grand night is such a delicate, bitter sweet moment. The return home, the aftertaste that lingers - it seems that on that long walk anything might happen, and should happen.

Edgar is coming sober faster than any of the others, especially Todd who is a nervous mess, and so after some debate he’s given the keys. It’s a big car, a Buick, back seat wide enough to accommodate two women and a little slip of a thing like Todd in a big easy slump. That’s good, because Jimmy has already crawled into the passenger seat, almost before Edgar finished unlocking the car. The feeling of the pitted steering wheel under Edgar’s hands wakes him up, shakes some of the bleariness from his head.

Ms. Reeds would not like to know how many mornings he has come into work at 6 am not yet clean and aching after a night of sleepless, dreamless drinking. He is aware that it is unsafe. Everything he dares take for himself is unsafe, why should this be any different?

The gear shift grinds a little, unfamiliar under his hand as he pulls out into the empty city streets. Todd rouses enough to give a general idea of where they’re headed--he lives in Brooklyn apparently, which is depressing enough--and at each light Edgar surfaces a little more. He is careful on the road, with other lives in his hands. It’s always better to drive with other people, for this reason.

He can feel Jimmy watching him as they go, all his dips and angles rendered unearthly in the low twilight, blue and black with his smudged eyes. Under the smoke of khol they seem to glitter from shadow. Edgar catches glimpses of it as he takes right hand turns, each time his gaze slides towards the passenger seat. Jimmy is watching him.

The backseat is quiet, murmur died down to a sleepy nothing, and outside of that precious bubble there is only the two of them and the darkness. They are alone in the still universe.

Out of the corner of his eye, Edgar sees the slow shift of motion, the drag, as Jimmy slides his hand up his thigh. Cloth folds and compresses, pushed higher and higher up the thigh until Edgar’s pulse is a kind of violence in his throat, and then Jimmy’s hand slides out of sight.

The road is grey and the sky is grey and Edgar clutches at the wheel for dear life as Jimmy’s skirts make a soft, rhythmic whisper. Edgar can almost feel the firm circle of the thumb as it passes up and down, the knot of Jimmy’s knuckle as it presses down, even though he can see none of it at all. Jimmy tips his head back, skinny chest pushing upward, breathing shallowly over his just barely visible tongue. His wrist works and works under the bunch of fabric, hips shifting, and then he turns his head--

It is all Edgar can do not to let them tumble off the bridge and into the lavender-black bay--

Jimmy licks his dry lips, locks eyes on Edgar, and comes with a gasp. It hitches, stutters in him as if he cannot get enough air into his lungs and he is being squeezed to the point of ecstatic breathlessness, fighting for survival through his little death.

The car thrums. He sighs, eyelids falling half-mast. His fingers slide free, smooth wetness, white on white, hovering in the air like the half remembered vision of a dream.

The image of it remains in Edgar’s mind for a long, long time after the ride is over--the smell of salt, the glow of Jimmy’s skin against the nascent daylight, and the incendiary force of Jimmy’s eyes finally, finally fixed on Edgar alone.

 


	5. What a Difference a Day Makes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Um, whoops. Sorry this took four months? In my defense, my original game plan was for this chapter to be twice as long, and I cut what I had down a lot after Dez politely but firmly told me to stop.
> 
> Warn-o for porn-o. Not really, but, you know. It gets steamy. Proceed with caution?

_There always was something inside of me,_  
_Right here like a wall -_  
_Seems that I never could break through,_  
_But I swear to God, Rose,_  
_That I loved her too…_  
— Finaletto of Frank Maurrant

~~

The first time Devi saw her, it was in a bar where she’d been hired for some musician back in January of '35. A white man with a trumpet, nothing to write home about, less appealing than the tuneless bustle of the kitchen and jostling alleyways. She had been in the crowd, wrapped in fur and drenched in sound, skin like a silver dollar in the starlight. And Devi had looked away, afraid of catching her eye, the buzz of hummingbird wings filling her ears. When she looked back, the woman was gone, like she’d never been there at all.

Everything had been different for Devi back then. Sure, she’d still been in the business of punching lights out of debtors, living on the hairline fractures from paycheck to paycheck, but she’d been open, too, less afraid to reach out for strangers’ hands. These days, she secrets herself away in the dusty rooms above the church, haunting her horrible little hermitage like a villain in a Dickens novel. On the plus side, at least she can get away with wearing trousers most of the time. The pigs barely pull anyone over for that anymore. Thank god for Katharine Hepburn.

She’d been the first woman Devi had ever loved, and the last person to ever touch her heart. Glimpses of divine beauty are once in a lifetime, and not for the faint of heart. That first glance of silvery cheeks shattered her, left her chasing after the broken shards with shadows and paint, imperfect copy after imperfect copy, grasping for sunlight at the bottom of a well until the tubes of blue and black produce nothing else, no matter how she squeezes. The images she conjures up out of the darkness can’t warm the empty place in her arms.

“Do you like the music?” She’d asked, the second time she saw her, the first time she reached out. Her fingers twist on the iron rail of the balcony. It was so long ago, but if she closes her eyes, she can smell the sweat, feel the crush of evening chatter. See her - the girl had turned, stagelights dancing over those glassy spectacles, huge and round as the moon - 

“Not really,” she replied, and smiled. “I’m afraid trumpet’s not really my thing. I’m just here with my boyfriend. He’s just crazy about that sort of stuff.”

She pointed a gloved finger back towards a table lost in the dark haze, and Devi’s eyes followed it - 

Devi doesn’t remember any of their faces, not anymore, but it doesn’t really matter, not with the starlight girl at her elbow. The waitresses pushing past them are faceless when Devi rebuilds the memory, and so is the clientele. The woman next to her is perfect, every freckle and fallen hair in exactly the right place, every glint of the low light sparkling off her necklace, her earrings, mirrored in perfect unison with the fluttering of the orange electric lights.

“Oh,” Devi said, “that sounds like a pain. He take you out to things he likes a lot?”

“I guess,” she said. “What about you? Do you like the music?”

Devi snorted. “Please. I’m just here to pick up my check.”

The girl had laughed, small and contained as a firefly in a jar. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have assumed,” she said, “what do you do? Are you one of the bartenders?”

“Nah, I’m in enforcement. Keep people in line.”

“I should have guessed.” When Devi glanced at her, she caught the girl’s eyes focused intensely on her arms. For a moment’s pause, with heat growing at her neck, she found herself wishing desperately she could be one of those slim Clara Bow types, just skin clinging to bone - “that’s really impressive,” the girl said, “can I…?” Her fingers hung in the air, not quite touching, unwilling to retreat.

And Devi had shrugged, as though it didn’t matter to her if the girl felt for her or not, as though her palms weren’t sweating nor her pulse racing nor her skin begging for the white satin of those gloves. “Knock yourself out,” she said, rolling her sleeve up before her brain could tell her this was a bad idea.

It was worth it, worth any pain that followed, just for the feel of her touch, her delighted gasp, the firefly laughter lost in the dark.

“Tess!” A man hollered from across the crowd, and the girl had startled, swiveled to look, hands drawing back under her furs. “Wrap it up, we’re gonna bounce. Cleo says she knows a place that’s open till four - who’s this?” He glanced Devi’s way, then shot her a double-take, sneering and scowling.

She remembers enough of him to remember he was painfully ugly. It was the second thing she noticed, right after the way the girl flinched when he touched her.

“Devi,” she said, tipping her chin brusquely, “I’m enforcing this joint. On the clock, as it happens. Hope everyone remembered to settle their bill.”

The memory stammers - 

_She was on the balcony, and Tess, glasses round and pale as the moon, whispered “let me take you away, just say the word and I’ll take you away - “_

She is - 

She - 

Devi wasn’t in the business of bleeding her heart out for every lost cause couple, every beautiful woman on some nasty sombitch’s arm. It wasn’t pity that snared her when Tess looked back over her retreating shoulders, pulled along by a man who didn’t deserve her. Just her lips, and the words they formed even when her voice was lost - _’here, tomorrow’_ \- 

_“ - say the word and I’ll take you away - “_

Her shadows fall away around her, and Devi is alone again in her quiet, dusty home. The girl with the silver-dollar skin is gone.

She has been for a long time. It still aches.

~~

Jimmy wakes up with a borderline professional level of resistance and grunts unattractively, slapping at the hand on his shoulder. “No, fuck off,” he mumbles, and tries to roll over.

“Jimmy,” Edgar’s voice says, “get up, now.”

“Fuck,” he repeats, “fucking fine. Fuck. ‘M up, what, what, what…”

With more effort than he likes to expend at whenever-in-the-morning, he pulls his agonizingly dry eyes open (and what the fuck, alcohol dries you out a _little_ but his stupid eyes are, like, _glued_ shut, and what’s _that_ all about) and takes in approximately three details. One, he’s in a thoroughly unidentifiable room, some shabby little studio apartment’s spare or (more likely) a closet with a mattress in it. Two, he’s in a dress, and he’s pretty sure there’s nothing underneath it. Three…

Three…

Three is that Edgar is holding him by the shoulder, barely six inches from his face, leaning over him and so close Jimmy can feel his breath ghosting over his ear, legs tangled in the same mess of sheets as his own, light from the small window in the corner illuminating his hair like a halo around him, _also_ in a dress - 

At which point, Jimmy’s brain short circuits because fucking _come on_ , how is he supposed to handle that like four seconds after coming around. His head hits the pillow. “Uh,” he says, “did we, uh…”

“What?” Edgar looks annoyed. “Would you get up, please? This is an emergency. Devi’s been up for an hour, and she’s pissed. We’re stuck in 1968.”

“Uh.”

There’s no way this is an accident. This _has_ to be on purpose, right? Jimmy shifts, feels Edgar’s knee on the mattress between his legs. His brain melts into a pool of arousal below his stomach. “Uh,” he says again, because like, he would love to Casanova the shit out of this, but there is _nothing._ “This a dream?”

“What?” Edgar says again, though he looks more confused than a few moments before. “You alright?”

“I’m super hungover.”

“Yeah, who isn’t,” he grumbles, pinches the bridge of his nose, and shifts off of Jimmy, rolling onto his side. “I meant more the jumps. You were in a pretty bad way last night.”

“What time is it?”

“Five in the evening. You’ve been out for twelve hours.”

“Fuuuck.” He scrubs at his face with a palm. It’s smeared with something black when he looks at it - looks like the stuff his mom paints beauty marks on with, except it’s all over his eyes. Fuck. “When’d you get up?”

“I didn’t really sleep,” he admits, “by the time we got here, I was pretty much awake, so I just…” he trails off. “Look, would you get up? I wasn’t kidding about there being an emergency.”

“Yeah, yeah, Devi’s on the warpath, I got it - “

“No, that’s not it,” Edgar says, and glances away nervously. “Your sister’s car is parked outside.”

If Edgar had gone for the more traditional route with a glass of cold water to dump on Jimmy’s face, he would have taken several seconds longer to launch himself out of bed, and he probably wouldn’t have slammed his forehead quite as hard into the side of Edgar’s skull. They both swear - Jimmy in a long panicked stream of hissing curses, Edgar in a singular, deliberate sort of way, clutching at his temple in pain. Where other men would break out into apologies, Jimmy bounds towards the window to peer out - sure enough, there’s the dark blue flash of a familiar 1939 Opel Admiral, ridiculously old-fashioned but still stubbornly running. Even older-fashioned now, if they’re in the sixties…

“How d’you know it’s her car?” He asks as Edgar comes up behind him to peer down at it. He recognizes it, sure, but dark blue is always a popular color, and surely, it wasn’t _such_ a rare model - anyway, maybe it’s a collector’s item. A boy he doesn’t recognize is running a reverent hand over the hood and cooing at it to the enormous dog winding its way around his knees.

When he glances to his side, though, Edgar’s jaw is set. “It’s hers,” he says firmly, “I can hear it vibrating from here. The cylinder head for one of the spark plugs is undersized, and it’s always coming loose.”

Jimmy gazes at him, jaw loose, eyes wide. Edgar looks back at him.

“It’s hers,” he repeats, quieter this time, “and she’s on her way. We need to go.”

He swallows. “Yeah,” he says, “yeah.”

The living room of the studio apartment (if you could call it a living room) is poorly lit, despite being flooded by the artificial light from two standing lamps and what looks like a string of blue Christmas tree lights - there’s only one window, which is providing the bare minimum of natural illumination from the setting sun. It’s a pretty pathetic aperture, to be sure. A single glance tells him he probably couldn’t crawl through it even if it _could_ be pried open, and with thirty-some years of that, uh, weird black stuff that gets on window panes when they don’t get opened often enough - that was in Snow White, wasn’t it? Not the Disney picture, the picture book he’d had as a kid - the queen had looked at that stuff and thought it’d make a good hair color for her daughter or something. Kind of dumb, in retrospect, and he never liked that story. What’d he done with that book? Did he lend it to Edgar? Or - 

“Good, you’re up,” Devi says, and Jimmy gives her a look of the same surprise he uses when he finds out a woman stuck around overnight. She’s less perturbed by it than most people are. Then again, she’s a stone-cold monster hunter, so it figures shit wouldn’t bother her. “We’ve been waiting for an hour. Hope you had a nice nap.”

“I didn’t, actually,” Jimmy says, and glances to the apartment door. He might be imagining it, but he thinks he can hear footsteps on the stairs. The sweat stinks at his neck. “But I’m here now, alright? Come on, let’s go.”

“Hey, hold on,” Tenna interrupts, and Jimmy looks for her voice - and suddenly he takes in the rest of the room. Half the living…room? Living room? Is taken up by a kitchenette, and most of the kitchenette is taken up by a round wooden table, barely large enough to play bridge at (if they were all forty-year-old-women who wanted to play bridge or something. Which they’re not, obviously. Although, who knows? Edgar’s apparently a bit of a card shark - and why the _fuck_ can he remember Edgar wiping the floor with him in Hearts but not how he wriggled his way into a black dress, what the _hell_ did they do last night), and most of the table’s space is taken up by Tenna and the kid from last night. “Why rush off? Todd’s still got some orange juice. Don’t you want some?”

“Why would I want orange juice?” Jimmy snaps.

Tenna wrinkles her nose meaningfully. “Well, _look_ at you,” she says, and _tut tuts_ pityingly. “If you won’t, you can at least thank Todd for the mattress and the place to stay. He didn’t _have_ to take in your soggy - what are you wearing?”

Jimmy glares at her, then (feeling that whatever Tenna’s made of, it’s clearly stern enough not to wilt under his headlights) flashes the look onto the kid - Todd - who crumples under its intensity. He squeaks. “Uh,” Todd says, “you don’t really have to - “

“Hush, Todd,” Tenna says, “hush. This doesn’t concern you.”

“I’m not fucking around!” Jimmy snaps, and Tenna flinches back, looking more annoyed than offended. “We need to get out of here, now.”

“Tenna,” Devi says, calm but authoritative, “come on.” And she reaches her hand out.

Tenna looks from Devi to Jimmy, her face a mixture of irritation, confusion, and - unless Jimmy is the worst at reading faces, which, okay, he kind of is _sometimes_ , but he’s got a feeling about this one - creeping fear. “Okay,” she says after a moment’s hesitation, and gets herself up out of her chair and halfway across the room towards them, catching Devi’s palm in hers. She glances over her shoulder at the kid, still sitting dumbstruck at the table, and flashes him a huge, cheesy smile. “Thanks for the lunch, doc!” She adds, thoroughly upbeat, “give your ma our love, and all that.”

The kid opens his mouth like he’s going to say something, but he’s interrupted by a knock on the door - 

All five of them glance as one towards it, and suddenly he can feel Edgar’s warm hand slipping into his - 

And he steps into 

_thedarkthedarkthedarkandhe_

_looks up into a bejeweled forest, trees glittering and blossoming with sapphires and gold-_

They step out into Devi’s apartment, and Edgar jerks himself back into reality, teeth chattering hesitantly in his mouth. He looks down - his hands are still in good condition, raised in a gooseflesh pattern but still brown and knobby and soft as he can keep them - and then catches Jimmy by the upper arm as he sways unsteadily, holds him more or less upright.

“You alright?” He asks. There’s sweat on the boy’s neck.

Jimmy touches his temple and shakes his head vaguely, like he’s shaking a pervasive fog off his shoulders. “Yeah,” he says, “guess I shouldn’t have gone so hard last night, though.”

Edgar sighs in relief - on Jimmy’s other side, Tenna takes him by his other shoulder. “You’re sure you’re alright?” She asks. Jimmy grunts.

“C’mon, I said I was okay, I’m fine,” he insists.

“Good,” she says, and slaps him upside of the head. “What kind of manners do you call those? Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” She gets a grip on his ear and pulls him level with her, despite a wail of protest. Edgar startles back. “Honestly, would it kill you to thank someone on occasion? If I didn’t know you were raised in some mansion, I’d say you were raised in a barn. When someone offers you hospitality - “

Jimmy pulls loose from the grip and settles quickly into a bickering click, but Edgar tunes it out as he sees Devi turn in towards him, her shoulders a straight line rotating to separate them from the others. “Cassandra,” she says, brow furrowed, “you see it too, don’t you? When we…when he jumps.”

He nods silently. “The endless night,” he agrees, “we were there longer. It was different, wasn’t it? Did you see - “

“ - The grove,” she agrees, “the place that catches lightning for the labyrinth.”

“Yes,” he says, and frowns. “Can you - how did you know what it was? I thought you couldn’t see the trails.”

She shrugs. “I can’t,” she admits, “I just know the person who built it.”

~~

_October, 1936._

Tess remembers the first girl she ever kissed. Curls of chestnut brown hair, brown eyes, white teeth, broad smile. She giggled too much, but there’d been a time when she’d found that endearing. Her name had been Charisse, or Clarissa, or something. She’d been…twelve, maybe, to Tess’ eleven, older and prettier and easier to amuse. The whole thing had been a joke, but Tess hadn’t been the punchline, so she smiled and laughed with the rest and ignored the pit of shame in her stomach.

Devi doesn’t giggle too much. Devi doesn’t laugh at all. Devi doesn’t so much as crack a smile at the Silly Symphonies when they rendezvous in the dark showrooms of the movie theater. She has a stoic, stalwart expression of disinterested determination, as pale as the marble goddesses watching over the lilac bushes of the Troy Female Seminary and twice as hard. It’s hard, sometimes, to remember she’s flesh and blood, warm and soft in the moonlight. Maybe that’s why it always catches Tess off-guard when Devi kisses her - not the kiss itself, but the surge of her body, her anxious hands unable to find a mark, the goosebumps raising on her skin when Tess runs a finger over her neck. To think the stone woman is human, too. To think she loves Tess back.

Tess orders drinks from the bar and carefully makes her way back through the crowd, terrified to spill anything on the only red dress she owns. When she reaches their booth, Devi is staring pensively at the advertisements on the wall. She barely shifts when Tess scoots into the seat across from her.

Tess frowns. “Penny for your thoughts.”

Devi glances at her from the corner of her eye, tips her head slightly so she’s almost looking Tess’ way. “It’ll cost you more than that.”

“A dollar, then.”

“Quit lowballing me, Reeds.”

“Don’t call me that,” she replies automatically, pretends not to notice the way Devi’s fingers flinch, “I don’t know if you’re trying to be funny or if you’re just in a mood, but I can’t deal with it right now, alright?”

“You can’t deal with _anything_ ,” Devi says sourly. When Tess doesn’t respond, she nurses her drink.

The silence stretches on for much longer than it should. Tess should know better than to wait for an apology by now, but she does anyway. It doesn’t come.

A dish breaks in an adjacent room, probably the kitchen. There’s a muffled cacophony, a flurry of motion, men in badly fitted suits scurrying back and forth, just more rats in the sewer. Eventually, Tess tips her head back against the cushion. “What were those things?” She asks. “The big…thing. In the alley. You've seen them before, haven’t you?”

Devi’s jaw is working in that way that means she’s chewing her tongue. “Tenna calls them biembiens,” she says, “We’ve been…I’ve been seeing them for a while. Didn’t really believe they were real at first. Figured I was imagining them.”

“What are they?”

“I don’t know,” she says irritably, “do you?”

“What?”

“It seemed pretty interested in you,” she says, “Tenna couldn’t even pull its attention. Normally, those things go apeshit over fire, but it was like it wasn’t even bothered.” She scowls over her glass, mouth in a tight, thin line, all red lipstick and blast furnace eyes. “What, you two in the same graduating class? How’d it know you?”

Tess starts to think about the creature, and abruptly stops with a shudder when the sight of its teeth catches the edge of her memory. The danger is long passed, but her heartbeat leaps into her throat anyway, sweeping her up in the mad, hysterical rush of blood. “I don’t kn-“ she starts, but the sound chokes her. She takes a long sip of her drink. The ice shifts and clatters in her glass. “I’m sorry,” she says instead, “I shouldn’t have been there.”

“What - shit, don’t apologize, fuck,” Devi says, far too quickly for her aloof facade. When Tess hazards a glance at her, the marble jaw is gone, replaced by wide eyes and helplessly parted lips. “It’s not as though - I mean - fuck, this isn’t your _fault_ , Tess, I didn’t mean - come on,” she pauses, runs her palm down the length of her face. “Stop looking at me like that,” she adds after a moment’s consideration.

Tess blinks. She hadn’t realized she was giving Devi a look of any kind. “Like what?” She ventures, shrugging her shoulders up around her neck, preparing for a tongue lashing she can feel broiling over the horizon.

“Like you’re afraid of me.” She looks down then, into her drink, eyes flicking away, covering that irradiated green from view. Without her bright eyes blazing through Tess, she looks very plain, and very tired.

“I thought you wanted everyone to be afraid of you.”

“Not everyone,” Devi says, “not you.”

Tess watches her for a moment. She thinks of girls she’s wasted time loving, boys who sneered and raised their hands to her. Time lost, music missed, dances spent on the edge of a crowd just waiting to be disappointed. She reaches across the table and brushes a strand of Devi’s hair behind her ear, smiles when she looks up.

“I’m only a _little_ afraid of you,” she says. Devi scowls.

“I’m being serious.”

“So am I,” she says, and leans back in the booth, gazing out at the swarm of dancers and waiters and self-important men blowing smoke, filling the small room with ego and the stench of Marlboros. The thought occurs to her that she’s desperately hungry. Her mother’s put her on the damned grapefruit diet, nothing but black coffee and cigarettes and God’s horrible fruit mistake for three weeks. On the one hand, the weight is simply falling off her. On the other, the gnawing hunger never goes away, and her joints are painfully sore. “You’ve got a terrible temper. Sometimes it frightens me. And you’re always getting into fights with people. It’s terribly reckless, and one of these days it’ll get you killed.”

“I’m a bouncer,” Devi reminds her, “that’s my job. Don’t tell me you think I’m like that when I’m off the clock.”

Tess shrugs. “How could you be? When you’re off the clock, you spend all your time hunting down beasts from another dimension.”

“Or with you,” she interjects. Her lips are a hard line, but Tess thinks she can see something glittering in her eyes.

“Or with me! When do you get the time to sleep? You must do it standing up, like a racehorse,” Tess says, smiling. She pats at her pocket for a cigarette, realizes they were in her purse, and sighs despondently.

Devi seems to have had the same thought vis. cigarettes, and produces a battered package of Lucky Strikes from the depths of her jacket. “There’s plenty of standing up in my life already,” she says, tapping smokes out of the box and offering one to Tess (who accepts it gratefully, without even making a face at the brand), “when I get the chance to lie down at all, I take the time to enjoy myself.”

It’s a fairly innocuous comment, just another riff on the playful banter thing Tess has been pushing for, but the way she says it, one hand extended to light her cigarette for her, one thin eyebrow pointedly raised, sends something low in her stomach blooming with heat. Her knees are suddenly very loose and unsure of themselves.

“Want to get out of here?” She says after a moment. She can feel Devi’s ankle pressed against her own, and it’s sending her pulse out of control.

“More than anything,” Devi replies, and they move as one for their coats.

They swan through the evening half-light in urgent silence, walking in tandem into the cool October air, the tapping of sensible heels against the clunk of heavy work boots beating an ode out of percussion on concrete. As the shadows drape fashionably about their shoulders, they find the courage to reach for each other, fingers locked in a warm press of understanding.

~~

Jimmy’s had three glasses of champagne and is starting to seriously eye a fourth when his fiancee finally makes her presence known. To him, anyway. Given the way she’s been furtively sashaying through the thronging crowd of single men, hips checking, shoulders exposed, you’d have to be blind, drunk, or very, very gay to miss her. Hence, exhibit A.

She taps him on the shoulder, and he pretends to startle. “Oh, it’s you,” he says distractedly, “I didn’t see you there. Do you need something? I’m sort of busy.”

Anne curls her lip and wrinkles her nose. Combined with the caterpillar-thick false eyelashes she keeps batting, Jimmy gets the distinct impression of a mole in its burrow. All the black doesn’t really help her case. “Would it kill you to be civil? You’re already giving me a headache,” she says, dramatically pressing two fingers to her temple. “You’re _supposed_ to ask me for a dance. My mother’s riding my ass about it, and I’m seconds from _absolutely_ losing my mind.”

Jimmy glares her down, but she doesn’t budge. After a few moments, he lifts a glass of champagne from a passing tray. “Want a dance,” he snaps. It’s not really a question.

Her face contorts in a scowl. “I’d be delighted,” she hisses through gritted teeth, and wraps an arm around his shoulder. They sway towards the center, staring resolutely over one another’s backs.

“Never thought I’d be scraping the bottom of the barrel for a fiancee,” Jimmy says after a minute, as a means of small talk more than anything else. Anne scoffs near his ear.

“That’s my line,” she replies, “you talk big for sloppy fourths, Reeds.”

“Don’t call me that.”

She sniffs. “Well, it’s the truth, isn’t it? You couldn’t keep a wife if you tied her down. Some men would be ashamed of a record like - “

“Not what I meant,” he interrupts, “don’t call me Reeds unless you want me to knock you on your ass. On heels like those, it’d be a long way to fall.”

“How gentlemanlike of you.” She’s quiet for a moment, listening as the band moves seamlessly from _Lucky Star_ to _Silent Love_. A quick glance tells him he can thank his sister for the extended time on the dance floor - she’s slipping the trumpet player a twenty and giving suggestions he can’t make out through the distance and the noise. Anne follows his gaze. “I can’t _believe_ you two are related,” she says after a moment. Jimmy snorts.

“Yeah? Never heard that one before.”

“You know, you don’t _have_ to come for me with the barbs,” she says, still looking towards the band. Tess, maybe feeling her gaze from across the courtyard, turns her head and catches sight of them watching her - after a moment’s pause, she smiles and waves. Anne waves back, wiggling her fingers coquettishly. “I’m just as much a victim of this as you are. I wasn’t exactly chomping at the bit for the opportunity.”

“Likewise,” Jimmy says, staring at the champagne glass in his hand. If he shotguns it, he might be able to finish it while Anne is making eyes at his sister. While she’s - while - 

Wait a second - 

“If your name weren’t attached to you, believe me, there would be nothing to recommend you at all,” she continues on, either not noticing or just not paying attention to the way Jimmy’s eyes are slowly fixing on her face, “as it is, I suppose I’ll just have to find the advantages of my new position. Do you know if your sister likes poetry?”

“Wh- poetry?” The music is too slow and his brain is rushing too fast, two rhythmic patterns beating desperately against one another, “hold on - “

“ _Poetry,_ ” she repeats, lip curling, “you know, Ginsberg? Blake? Wolfe? It’s a fine art. I guess I’m not surprised you’ve never heard of it. It can’t really be understood by someone who doesn’t bother cracking open a book or two, after all.”

“If you’re after money, my sister’s not the easy target you think she is,” Jimmy says, jumping wildly to the first conclusion he can make. “You might want to start by wearing down my dad. Not much say in the company anymore, but he’s built up some savings and nothing to do with ‘em.”

Anne’s actually got the nerve to look offended. “You know, _some_ people are interested in things _deeper_ than just _money,_ ” she says, lips pursed, eyebrows high and haughty over half-closed eyes, “I pursue truth. Art. Beauty.” She shoots a smile over his shoulder. “Nothing _you’d_ understand.”

Jimmy’s subtle enough not to twist his head around to look behind him - instead, he uses his hold on Anne to rotate them around 180 degrees and get a glance of what she’s been looking at. There’s a cluster of older women drinking martinis, and an off-duty musician having a cigarette in the shade of the building, and between them, the glass doors to the smoking room, still closing slowly behind a retreating form in all black.

“Oh,” he says.

“Like I said,” she says, “you’ve got a reputation. I’ve got one, too. And I figure, a man with a reputation like yours is probably a little more understanding than a man without one. Especially since it runs in the family.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he says automatically, “I kind of have a lock-down on the position of ‘family disgrace’ here. Worst thing Tess ever did was stay single.”

She hums noncommittally. “Maybe so,” she says, “I guess it _was_ just gossip, after all. Then again, if she got caught, she’d be locked up, wouldn’t she? Anything substantial got swept away years ago.”

His eyes narrow. “You don’t have shit on her,” he says. He doesn’t feel as confident in his words as he usually likes to be. “You don’t know anything about us. About her.”

Anne rolls her eyes. “Honestly, you are so _dense_ ,” she huffs, “am I supposed to spell it out for you? She got caught with some cross-dressing greaser faggot back in the thirties. Broke up the only engagement she ever got her hands on. She’s been in business trying to bury it ever since.”

The song ends, and Jimmy drops his grip on her like he’s touched white lightning. She takes half a step back, shoulders slanted attractively, dark hair falling in waves around her face. As the press of people throbbing around them stills to applaud, he feels the air go stale. Another tray of champagne flutes floats by. Wordlessly, they both reach for one.

“I’m going inside,” she says at last, “it’s freezing out here. Nice chatting with you.”

Jimmy watches her go. Then he looks down at the two mostly-full glasses in his hands, and up at the trumpet player, flipping through the list of songs in the band’s repertoire, and makes a decision. They might be sticking with popular tunes this time in the evening, but they’re only ever a fiver away from _Moonlight in Vermont_.

~~

_December, 1937._

The mink coat is gorgeous, warm, luxuriously soft, and about thirty pounds. Tess fastens it carefully, then - since the mirror is right there _anyway_ \- double checks that the ribbon in her hair is still holding everything in place. The spot of red looks good against the monochrome of her face. Despite her mother’s desperate pleas, she’s lined her eyes thickly with kohl, like a silent film femme fatale. So what if it’s a decade out of fashion? She’s allowed to do what she wants with her face. Maybe the lipstick is a little too much, but - well, she can blot that. Alright, she’d better do that now…

Her eyes fall nervously on the package sitting on her table. This is a terrible idea, she _knows_ it’s a terrible idea, she knows how Devi gets. But - but she can’t just _not_ do it. It’s perfect for her, it’s a crime that she doesn’t already have it.

She’s not taking no for an answer. She’s _not_. Not tonight. Not about this. 

The snow is deep and overly soft, powdery and wet like a misplaced boot could sink knee deep into it. It’s still coming down in huge, soft flakes, highlighting the black of her hair and the brown of her coat, when she steps out of the taxi four blocks from the church and tips the driver generously for his discretion. He’s probably over-charged her anyway, but it’s not like she’s got another choice - she trusts Arturo with most of her life, but she can’t let him keep this secret. He’s got a head for propriety, for common decency. This would break his heart.

This would break everyone’s heart, really. Mother will cry about anything if she thinks it’ll get her a whiff of smelling salts, and father would make sweeping declarations about old family shame for a living if he could get paid for it.

Neither of them would do shit about it, though. Gripping the pale box under one arm and hoisting her skirts up to keep the wet off her hem, Tess kicks her way through a trough of melting ice. Too much shame, public shame, attached to their name. They’d just hush this up…bury it under stock exchanges and sensational purchases, fill the tabloids with tripe and burn this away…

Tears sting at the corners of her eyes, wet with the cold, and she blinks them back, distracted. Someone’s singing _Hark! the Heralds_ , an unbearable cluster of carolers and an even more irritating bundle of onlookers. She pushes her way past a set of revelers a little too deep into the Christmas toasts already, mumbling apologies she doesn’t really mean, and slips down a side road, trying not to stumble on familiar paths in the ice and the dark.

Tenna answers the door, which is a bit of a blessing, because if Devi had gotten there first, it probably would have been a terrific row right on the step. Instead, she gets a kiss on the cheek and an exuberant blessing, and an arm around her hips bearing her quickly inside. “We didn’t think you were stopping by,” she says, “at least, I didn’t. Devi’s been staring pensively out the window for about two hours so she can swivel around dramatically when you arrive. She’s done it to me on accident about four times.”

Tess laughs. “Sorry for the trouble,” she says, “I came as fast as I could slip away. Merry Christmas - are you going to the service?”

Tenna raises an eyebrow. “Maybe I’d better,” she says, and laughs as Tess flushes pink.

Devi’s room is all in shadow, a mess of crumpled shirts and half-used paints dancing around a tipped easel and canvas torn in two off a box frame. The woman in question is silhouetted against the illuminated darkness of the evening, solid against the flickering of candles and stars.

“Don’t get comfortable,” she says, not turning around, “you have a party you need to go to, don’t you?”

“As it happens,” Tess says, ignoring Devi’s instructions and beginning to unbuckle the fixtures on her coat, “I was there for half an hour before having a headache and going home. No one can object to a woman in pain, and no one’s going to check that I’m really there.” She tosses thirty pounds of mink onto the bed carelessly, even though she knows she’ll regret it soon - the church isn’t heated by anything but the kitchen stove, and her dress is way off the shoulders - but it’s worth it just to get the weight off. 

“Doesn’t mean you can just impose whenever you feel like it. I wasn’t expecting company.”

“That’s not what Tenna said,” Tess says conversationally, feeling her way across Devi’s countertop for a box of matches.

“Tenna?” The silhouette turns slightly. “What’d she say?”

Tess shrugs, then realizes Devi can’t see her anyway. “That you wanted me here,” she says, “but if she was lying, I can go. After all, I wouldn’t want to impose.”

Devi doesn’t reply, which is as close as she ever gets to conceding defeat. Tess smiles to herself in triumph as she feels the matchbox under her fingers, and reaches for the hurricane lantern by Devi’s bed.

“By the way, I brought something for you,” she says, as though the thought were just occurring to her, and lights the candle inside, “it’s on the dresser by the door.”

“I don’t need charity from - “

“Oh, _don’t_ let’s fight, it’s Christmas,” Tess interrupts, “it’s a gift. Spirit of the season. Anyway, I’m not taking it back.”

“You - “ Devi starts, turning on her heel in a typical fury to face her at last, and stops dead, voice choking off somewhere in her throat. Tess glances up and catches her face, eyes wide, lips parted, anger drying away like a waterfall in drought. She glances back down at herself.

“Oh,” she says, cheeks pink even under all the rouge, and runs a hand down the front of her dress, red and gold and flared slightly at the hips. “Do you like it?”

“I - “ Devi says, and falters again. At her sides, her fingers flex in an odd pattern, stammering but never quite pulling into a full fist. “You - how - “ she closes her mouth, lips pursed so tightly that the blood all seems to go out of them - then opens it again, without so much as a syllable to vocalize for it. The general impression is of an extremely handsome fish gulping for air at the membrane of a pond. 

“It _is_ quite a nice piece,” Tess says after a moment, when it becomes clear that no comprehensible dialogue is about to follow from her conversational partner, and that she had better go it alone, “my mother kicked, of course - she doesn’t like anything that shows as much as a collarbone, never mind a shoulder. And Dillion’s friends had a thing or two to say about it, as well…” she pauses, frowning in an appropriately contemplative way. It would be nice to pretend her public had been sufficiently adoring, but the criticism had run the gamut from ‘too revealing’ to ‘darling, will you _really_ allow yourself to be seen in _stays?_ ’ “But I knew you would - well. _Do_ you like it?” Forgetting herself - or, maybe forgetting her company - she gave a little spin, to make the skirt flare out.

Uncharacteristically, there was no snort or sneer or ‘oh, _really_ ,’ from the woman at the window, as there often was when Tess did anything particularly feminine or insipid in the vein of flaunting at a mirror or curtsying or, indeed, twirling her skirt. Instead, the typical comments about having some _dignity_ are replaced wholesale by a single hand raised to cover her lips. She still looks as though she’s been slapped with a live fish, but at least her mouth isn’t sawing open and shut like she’s carrying on a silent conversation with herself.

“Um,” she says from behind the hand.

Tess sighs and shakes her head, smiling indulgently, and steps forward, lifting her skirt to allow her passage over the detritus on the hardwood. If she’d been an objective viewer, she might have something derisive to think about Devi’s unshifting visage, the stupefied pallor. But the shock, the shaken flush across her cheeks burning indiscriminately from one ear to the next is so unusual, precious and rare as the cut of a sapphire, that she can’t help but take it in her hands to admire it. “Come away from the window,” she says, “I want to see you.”

Slowly, Devi steps towards her, tentative fingers reaching out to brush against the rapidly cooling skin of her shoulders. Tess shivers reflexively, but doesn’t pull away. “Uh,” Devi says, “how does it…stay on?”

“Oh,” Tess says, her fingers touching the hem self-consciously. “It’s pretty tight just above the - um - up here. Actually, you wouldn’t think it, but I’m not even worried about it slipping, it’s very sturdily - “

She lets Devi cut her off, but only because she does it with a kiss.

Anyway, it’s not as though she was saying anything important.

~~

Edgar’s actually worked up a bit of a sweat scrubbing the hood of the Rolls-Royce, and so is dressed down in rolled-up shirtsleeves when he hears the tune playing. As always, it catches his ear and tilts his head, and he smiles despite the cold water dripping its way down his arms.

“You know, it’s actually not so bad,” says a voice, and Edgar turns to see Jimmy emerging from the underbrush like a particularly overgrown patch of jewelweed, “the tune’s pretty catchy. I guess I see why you like it.”

“Well, hello to you too,” Edgar replies, unable to keep the smile out of his voice, “do you need some sort of assistance?”

“Uh, yeah, actually,” Jimmy says, and holds the two flutes of Moët and Chandon (the Reeds family’s drink of choice at these gatherings) aloft meaningfully. “See, I’ve got all this alcohol, and only one mouth. I think I need help _drinking_ all of this.”

“Uh- _huh,_ ” he says, dropping the sponge he’s been holding in a bucket of manky water by the front tire. “You know, I wish I could be of service, but there’s a sobriety clause in the employee contract at this establishment.”

“Pshh. Maybe you can just hold one for me,” he insists, drawing closer until he’s almost stepping on Edgar’s feet. Without thinking about it, Edgar takes the glass Jimmy’s offering him. “I need at least one hand free.”

Smooth as rivulets of rainwater, an arm slides its way around Edgar’s waist. He cocks an eyebrow, but finds himself looping his arm around Jimmy’s shoulder regardless. “You should know,” he says, suddenly unbearably close, “I don’t really know how to dance.”

“Oh yeah, I’m aware,” Jimmy says, “we’ve actually done this before. Got my toes stepped on a couple of times before I learned my lesson. But look, it ain’t that hard. I can teach you in thirty seconds.”

“That so?”

“It’s _very_ so, Vargas.”

“I think you might be drunk.”

“I think I’m about to show you how to cut a rug,” Jimmy insists, “see, all you gotta do is make a box with your feet, in a one-two-three pattern - sideways, up, together, and then you do the same thing but with reverse feet. Left, up, together - and then you’re stepping with your right foot, so you step out to the right, then back with your left foot, then together - and then repeat until you’re dizzy. That’s it.” He looks _unfairly_ proud of himself. “Not even thirty seconds! Ten seconds. Eleven, tops.”

By concentrating very intently on the ground, and watching Jimmy’s feet for cues about what direction he’s supposed to be going in, Edgar discovers he can (albeit very, very shakily) move in a box with his feet. By the time the second verse of the song is over, he’s barely glancing down, his glass is half-empty, and Jimmy is appreciatively whistling along with the tune. He feels himself smiling, and for once, doesn’t bother to ask himself why.

“You requested that song, didn’t you?” He asks after a moment. “For me?”

Jimmy’s shoulder blades stiffen under his fingers, then shrug. “I guess,” he says, trying to sound noncommittal, “guess I figured I couldn’t show my face down here without it.”

Edgar’s pulse is burning a hole in his chest - the blood in his wrists throbs every time his heart slams against his ribs. “Why here?” He manages. “Why now?”

Jimmy’s eyes don’t quite meet his - the tentative giddiness of seconds prior has been replaced with an odd, sallow melancholy in thin cheekbones. “I couldn’t stay there,” he admits, “I had to get away.”

“From her?”

“From everything,” he says, and tosses the last quarter of his champagne back, “it’s all shit. I wish I could burn it all down. Set that miserable old shack on fire and light a whole pack off the ashes. Fuck.” He shakes his head. “I keep running away,” he says, “only to go right back there. Every time, I just end up right back there - just going in circles - back there, shoveling shit, wishing I was here.”

He rests his head against Edgar’s shoulder, and Edgar realizes that they’re still dancing - or, at the very least, still swaying - without any music. He ought to pull away, since, really, he’s got no business being this close to the young master. But they’re - things are different now, aren’t they, they’re - they’re - they’re whatever they are - 

And he can still feel Jimmy’s gaze on him, breathless but laser-focused, that soft hiss of fabric in the glow of the evening -

“Here?”

“With you.”

Far away, the band explodes into the refrain of _Cheek to Cheek_ , and the tempo is so thoroughly different, so upbeat and unlike the sway of their bodies, but they are frozen, locked together, hearts racing, so completely alien to the rest of the world. The spaces between them burn, the air freezes and spikes as they leap together from one peak of vulnerable fear to the next, cresting in the moments where they look at each other, bare and somehow unashamed. Jimmy tips his head back, his eyes running down the length of Edgar’s face, eyes almost shut - 

And Edgar leans forward and kisses him, and feels all the hard edges under his grip soften.

They break apart, and he barely has a second to process the way Jimmy’s breath skirts over the wet skin of his lips before a hand wraps around the back of Edgar’s head, fingers twisting in his hair, and drags him back down again, teeth clacking. His body pulses, all fire and impatient sweat breaking out over his shoulders, and he grabs Jimmy by the lapels of his suit. In a daze, he realizes he dropped the glass in his hand somewhere - it probably broke on the ground, not that he can hear it, not when Jimmy moans against his lips, not when there’s a tongue plunging into the unresisting cave of his mouth, not when he’s being shoved against the side of the car.

“Fuck,” Jimmy hisses when they break away, canting his hips against Edgar’s, “this one better not be a dream.”

“What - “ Edgar starts, then breaks off abruptly with a whispered curse as Jimmy’s teeth find his neck. He twists his hands in the fabric of the suit coat, breathing hard as the mouth on his neck finds something that makes his knees go weak. “ _God,_ ” he whispers, and there’s an answering moan against his skin.

Jimmy pulls away abruptly, but Edgar’s grip tightens, keeping him close. “Hold on, hold on,” he mutters, and reaches for the rear door of the car, “just a second - “ 

His skin is flushed and his pupils are blown when he glances back at Edgar, chest heaving - and Edgar reaches forward and pulls his tie loose, fumbles at the first button at his collar, gets his fingers against the warm flesh of his throat - someone curses - 

The door opens, and they tumble in, Edgar on his back and Jimmy on top of him, swearing and running hands along the lanky flat of his chest. Edgar reaches towards his face, reaches to touch his cheek, and he turns his head, catches his thumb in his mouth, and his tongue is _smooth hot wet_ and his lips are flushing pink, his eyes - Edgar’s hips buck, grind up against the body pressing into him - and Jimmy _bites_ him, hard, and he _keens._

“Shitshitshit, fuck,” Jimmy is muttering, rutting back down against him, “let me, just, fuck,” he grabs Edgar by the wrist, drags the hand to his hair, and Edgar twists his fingers in it without complaint. It’s so thick with pomade, the fist he makes will probably leave an indent, which _should_ be disgusting, but the way Jimmy moans when he pulls on it makes his dick throb embarrassingly hard. “ _Fuck_ yes,” he whispers, and a giggle pours out over his lips.

It sounds more nervous than anything - a random vocal tic -

_His laughter a relentless whirlwind, his breathless yelps scraping the rafters -_

This is familiar.

“Let me,” Jimmy whispers, biting his lip and shuffling lower down Edgar’s body, the weight of his torso moving from Edgar’s stomach down to his groin, “let me just do this, just once - “ his fingers scrabble at the fastening button. Edgar’s stomach drops.

“Jimmy, wait - “

“It’s fine, it’s fine - “

“Jimmy - “

His fingers slip under the waistband of his pants and brush against the soft skin of his cock, and fire explodes up Edgar’s spine with a jolt and a cry - Jimmy curses and laughs in the darkness of the car - he burns with the humiliation of how badly he needs this, heartbeat throbbing through every wet inch of his flesh, how badly he needs to be touched, how badly he needs Jimmy to fucking _look at him_ again like he did in the low light of the street lamps, knees spread wide, skirt shifting over his thighs - 

_-laughter is a relentless-_

He’s just _convenient,_ he’s just _here,_ and Jimmy runs a thumb along the underside of his - he’s shivering in the darkness, he’s seen this before from outside the car - 

Edgar catches Jimmy’s hand by the wrist and pulls him away violently, swearing - “I told you to _wait,_ ” he snaps, and scrambles back until he’s almost upright, leaning against the door on the other side of the car - Jimmy is staring at him, eyes wide, slack-jawed like he fell behind and is struggling to keep up - furious heat builds behind Edgar’s eyes and he struggles with the mechanism of the door, opens it and scrambles out into the night, gasping for clear air.

“Wait, wait,” Jimmy is saying, crawling after him, and Edgar shoves his shirt back into the waistband of his pants, stumbling a few steps forward to put distance between the two of them, “I shouldn’t, I didn’t - I shouldn’t’ve done that, I just got caught up in it, don’t be mad - “

“That’s not the problem, Jimmy,” Edgar says, crossing his arms, brain still stuffed with hot fog and memories of Jimmy in the back of his sister’s car, in the back of _this_ car, skirts frothing around his hips. “I’m not going to be some…escapade for you to waste your time with.” Even as he says it, his stomach sours. He almost can’t bear to look over his shoulder.

Jimmy looks confused, which just makes it worse, honestly. His collar is bent out of shape, tie frazzled, buttons undone, picture-perfect post-coitus dashing, but instead of that silly sideways grin, he’s got a loose, directionless jaw, and eyes squinting in the dark. “But - but it’s not like that,” he says, like he doesn’t understand why he has to explain, “this is different, okay? _You’re_ different, you’re not like those - those airheads, those - “ he breaks off, makes a frustrated noise. “It’s _different,_ ” he repeats helplessly. Edgar’s jaw goes tight.

“Is it?” He asks. “Two glasses of champagne, obscure location, the song on request? I don’t know, Jimmy, it kind of _feels_ like it’s the same thing you always do.”

“But that’s not - that’s just the superficial shit, that doesn’t mean anything. I came down here to _see_ you, I wanted to _talk_ to you - “ Jimmy runs a distracted hand through his hair, like he’s thinking hard. He’s trying to dig his way back out, trying to save his skin - and after all, isn’t it always about him, about what he wants? Edgar can feel his heart calcifying. To think he’d been tricked so easily, so quickly - and he shouldn’t even care, that’s what burns the most, that this kid messed him up that bad, made him care about this. Made him care about _anything._ “How do you not get it? You’re not the same, you - I - “

The boy struggles for words, but Edgar finds his already in his mouth. “Go home,” he says, “your family’s waiting for you. I’m going to bed.”

He can feel Jimmy’s eyes on his back as he turns towards the garage and makes his way up the stairs. He can feel them on him until after he’s walked back into his empty quarters and switched off the lights, waiting in the dark, fingers cold and heart in his throat. And he waits.

It’s only after he hears the sound of the car revving and driving away that he slinks, ashamed, into his room, and lets the darkness swallow him whole. He doesn’t sleep.

~~

_June, 1938._

All the skin’s been flayed off Tess’ knee by the rough gravel of the alleyway, but she staggers up anyway as she hears the sound of the beast rushing towards her, a mad onslaught, like tearing fabric in a harsh wind. Devi wants to call out to her, but the darkness is closing in on them, blowing funnels of grey smoke between all three. Somewhere, in the falling shade, she can see the distant explosions of light, Tenna’s cannon fire relentless and experienced.

She summons her fear, sharpens it in her hands, sends Sickness into the depths. The _biembien_ screams from everywhere and nowhere, a sound that she can feel more than hear. It’s a fucking shitshow of a sound, but it means the creature’s distracted, and won’t notice a puny human stumbling through the clearing dust. Devi never takes her eyes off the place that the monster should be, but she sidesteps her way towards Tess.

“Come on,” she hollers between the wind and the fire as she catches her girlfriend by the elbow, “we need to pull back! We don’t have the firepower - “

“Wait, wait,” she replies, “we’re close, I can feel it - it’s frightened, it’s going to retreat any second now - “

“We’re _scrubbed,_ ” Devi snaps, “we’re pulling out _now_ , that’s an order. We just need to get around to Tenna - “

“How? This thing’s between us, you want me to circumnavigate?”

“Can’t you? You told me the space thing wasn’t an issue - “

“Normally it’s not! This thing’s interfering with my pathways, I don’t know if I can - “

“Just try!”

Devi hates being afraid. She hates living in her own skin, seconds from leaping out of it like greased lighting, hates the horrible beast overstepping its boundaries into her world. She hates having to rely on anyone, even her teammates, but she hates relying on them even more when they don’t trust her. Tess looks at her, glasses knocked off somewhere and lost in the fray, and for a second, she looks like she’s going to say no, that she can’t make space twist around her hands - and then she nods.

“Okay,” she says, her words swallowed by the cacophony, “I’ll try.”

She shakes her arm loose of Devi’s grip, and Devi turns her attention back to Sickness, deep in the pit of the beast. Somewhere beside her, she feels the uncomfortable warp vibrating through her skin, like something trying to melt her away. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see a shadow about the same size and shape of Tess, but she doesn’t bother looking at her head-on. There won’t be anything there.

The cannon fire shoots high above them in a fireworks display and stops abruptly - at her left, Tess grabs her elbow, as solid as ever, and at her right, Tenna brushes soot off her hands. Devi sighs in relief.

“Tenna,” she calls out, “we’re making a - “

“ - Hasty retreat, yeah, yeah,” Tenna interrupts, “I know, Tess told me. It hasn’t pulled back yet, how are we supposed to lose it?”

“We circumnavigate out. Tess, take us through.”

Tess looks like she’s going to protest, but she’s interrupted by the sound of shattering glass, like a beer bottle thrown from a high window into the street. Devi turns her head for the source of the noise - 

Something slams her in the stomach, throwing her backwards into a brick wall - someone screams, she can hear

chittering teeth something slobbering over the lip of its maw in that place between the abysses

She can’t move, her back hurts too much, it’s too dark to see - somewhere beyond the blur of her vision, something explodes in a wall of red light - Tenna’s putting up a good fight out there, but she’s weak, they’re all weak - they should have run before the tides started turning - 

chittering - Tess is screaming her name but she can’t hear her over the roar of the rats, the slop of the ichor, and where is her fear, where is Sickness

_And it is dark._

_She’s never seen the darkness so clearly, so brightly - her bones vibrate with the shifting waves, the worlds between worlds - above her, she can see Tess, arms raised, loops of color shifting in and out of reality, between the grey smoke of the courtyard and the luminous darkness of some other place - a place she could almost touch, if only she could reach out towards it. Dark, blue-black walls, flat and shining like obsidian._

_They layer over each other, two places intersecting, vibrating as they touch, and she knows instinctively that she could pass from one to the other like a doorway - that once she passed through, she would have to wait for the doorway to return, that one place is not like the other, that she cannot travel through them without a hand to guide her. That to be caught between them as they shut would be -_

That other place disappears as fluidly as it had come, and the _biembien_ , tentacles caught reaching from this dusty world into the ethereal cleanliness of the obsidian hallways, is decapitated at every opening from one to the other. The scream is agonizing - Devi’s hand snaps up to her ear, as though that could protect her from a sound inside her head - and the miserable creature’s alien, octarine blood splashes down at their feet.

_\- catastrophic._

Tess falls - the creature reaches for her with what little it has left - but Tenna is there, beating it back with fire, screaming with rage Devi would never have guessed she had. The beast cries out, pulls back, and slips away between two buildings into the darkness.

After a moment, Tenna sits. The dust floats around them, like a miserable halo highlighting their mistakes. Devi takes a breath in and tries to think of something to say - she could go snarky, maybe, with a ‘ _well,_ that _went well,_ ’ or a leaderly ‘ _everybody alright?_ ’, only everybody is so clearly _not_ alright that she can’t really see _that_ going over well - she could apologize, except that would mean she did something _wrong,_ and frankly, she’s just not all that sure that she _did_ do something wrong, because how was she supposed to know that - and then she breathes too much dust in and starts coughing.

Tenna startles and turns around, and with some shock, Devi realizes there are tears on her cheeks. “Oh my God,” she says, and scrambles on hands and knees towards the crumpled form of her friend, “you’re alive! I thought that would’ve killed you for sure.”

Devi could make a good crack about having Loony Tunes bones, or of being harder to get rid of, but instead she just says “huh?” and lets Tenna hug her. Her back isn’t actually all that bad. When she first hit the wall, she assumed it was broken, but there’s no numbness, just a lot of acute, bruising agony. Maybe she missed her spine? Is that possible? It doesn’t _seem_ possible.

“Tess,” she says, when she’s more or less done being hugged and Tenna is wiping her face off and looking a little bit embarrassed about the whole thing, “is she okay?”

“She’s still breathing,” Tenna says. There’s sweat gleaming on her brow, and the filthy air is attaching itself to any moisture it can find. They’re all going to need a bath after this. “She looks bad, but not dead. How’s your back?”

“Better than it was ten minutes ago.”

“Good. Help me get her upright.”

Elbow to elbow, they shuffle in tandem to Tess’ reclining form. Devi feels her breath catch in her throat, which is typical, and annoying, and annoyingly typical - trust her body to catch feelings before her brain ever did - she’s stirring, eyelashes fluttering against her cheek and shoulders shifting under Devi’s hands. “Tess?” She says quietly. “Theresa?”

“Ugh,” Tess mumbles, and tries to shrug her hand off, “don’t call me that. What are you, my mom…” Her eyes open, squint, and blink. “Ugh - Dee?”

Devi looks at Tenna. Tenna looks at Devi. “Honestly, I’m just glad she’s alive,” Tenna says after a minute.

“Fuck are my glasses?”

“And she’s sentient. They’re somewhere around here, Tess, but we’ve got to go. Can you walk?”

“Walk _this_ off, asshole,” she mumbles, and leans her weight against Devi. Normally, Devi would complain, but Tess weighs, like, ninety pounds, maximum, and as much as she normally argues that Tess should stand up for herself and depend on no one, it’s kind of flattering when she starts doing the wide-eyed-heroine on Devi’s chest. Kind of makes her feel like the Blood-and-Sand Matador or something, a real Rudy Valentino type.

Between Tenna’s encouragement and Devi’s brawn, they manage to get upright and start stumbling towards a blind pig that’s great about never asking any questions. Tess’ purse made it through all right, and she’s growing more conscious by the minute, which is usually a good thing when drinks are concerned. Devi’s back still hurts like shit, but it’s definitely a bruising thing, and not a shattered rib cage thing. She’s got no idea how Tenna’s faring, but Tenna doesn’t air her dirty laundry out unless it’s an emergency, so silence is probably good in this case. They’re roughed up and exhausted, but they’re alive.

Generally, there’s a rule that they don’t talk about the fight at all when it goes well, and they don’t talk about it until they’re three drinks in when it doesn’t. This time, Tenna barely waits until they’re seated. “What the hell was that?” She asks the second the waitress is out of earshot.

“I had it under control,” Devi grumbles.

“Not _that,_ ” Tenna replies, “the light show. Tess, what did you do?”

Tess shrinks in her chair. “Um,” she says, as both women turn to stare her down, “I don’t…know?”

“Not good enough,” Devi says.

“I’m serious!” Tess says, glancing back and forth, “I was just trying to circumnavigate. I told you those things mess with the labyrinth, I couldn’t pass through like I normally can. I was - trying to move Devi, but I couldn’t get to her in time, and I - “ she cuts herself off with a cough. “I don’t know how I did it,” she says, “I’m sorry. I wish I could tell you.”

Tenna takes one of Tess’ hands in both of hers. “Hey,” she says, and shoots Devi a meaningful look, “we’re a team. Maybe this is good! You’re getting stronger.”

“Maybe that _is_ good,” Devi admits, “since the _biembiens_ are, too.”

Tenna scowls. “They’re not getting stronger,” she says, “we’re just getting sloppy. We didn’t even have a plan this time, did we? We just rushed in. Overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer, Dev.”

“That can’t be it - not all of it, anyway,” Devi says. “A couple blasts of fire, that used to be all it took. And did you see all that dust? That thing’s bigger than it used to be. We could’ve cornered one in an alleyway down on Westside when we started. Now…” She frowns. Tenna’s frowning back at her.

“Now what? Now it’s still a big fuckin’ monster that we have to drive back. Devi, we’re just here to protect this city. We used to be scared of those things, and now we’re not. That’s all there is to it. We just need to be smarter.” Tenna glances at Tess again. “And tougher.”

“Um,” says Tess. “Well. Maybe we _should_ be more strategic in the future. At least about a retreat plan when things go south. That was almost ugly.”

Devi scowls, and turns out to watch the room. Their drinks swoop in after a moment, and Devi tries to drink her scotch and orange in peace, except that she’s apparently decided to lay her closest affections on two asshole extroverts who won’t give her a moment of silence.

“Dev, are you drinking a blood and sand? Gross,” Tenna says.

“Oh, I guess,” she says, sighing. “I’ve just had Rudolph Valentino on the mind.”

“Ugh. Why?”

“I don’t know. He _was_ rather handsome, though, wasn’t he?”

Tess wrinkles her nose. “He certainly was…a man,” she concedes after a moment, “I always thought you’d go in more for the Cary Grant type, though.”

“No way. He’s so… _old._ ”

“Valentino’s been dead for ten years.”

“Yeah. He’s young… _forever._ He’ll always be under forty. And slim. Why aren’t more actors _slim_ these days? They’ve all got jaws like they’re trying to chew gravel.”

“I’m not even going to dissect everything weird about what you just said,” Tess says, smiling, “but have either of you been watching hair-oil-guy over at the bar? He’s been talking to this woman for ten minutes, and he’s making _zero_ headway. I’m getting so much second-hand embarrassment.”

Tenna whistles. “Yiiikes. Is he wearing a _wedding ring?_ He didn’t even bother taking his wedding ring off?”

Devi fakes a yawn. “How can you two be invested in people-watching? People are horrible.” _Is_ he wearing a wedding ring? She can’t _see_ a wedding ring.

“Shut up, hermit,” Tenna says, “you love it.”

Despite herself, she smiles. She _does_ kind of love it.

The next round of drinks comes, and the next, and after a while, someone stretches and announces that they’re going home. Tess picks up the check, Tenna gets a head-start, citing some dress she was supposed to have done by eight tomorrow that she’s barely started re-seaming, and Devi feels the outline of her gun against her hip as she takes Tess by the elbow.

They’re living dangerously, walking home like this, but sometimes, Tess doesn’t even seem to notice. And she’s the one who’s done this before, she’s told Devi as much herself. Tess is the one who knows how to lie.

“They _are_ getting stronger,” Devi says to her quietly as they slip through a shortcut onto a different road, “Tenna and I used to be able to fend them off on our own.”

Tess looks down at the concrete. “I know,” she admits.

“Why didn’t you back me up?”

“Tenna’s never going to believe it. She never believes that things are getting worse, you can’t convince her that they are.”

“You could at least _try,_ ” Devi says, sourly, “she’s going to get hurt.”

“She’s not _wrong,_ you know,” Tess says, “about strategizing. It _would_ help.”

“I strategize,” Devi says, feeling defensive, “I’m working at it. But that thing is growing faster than we are. How are we supposed to keep up?”

“Hey,” Tess says, and squeezes her arm, “Tenna’s growing. Did you see her tonight? She almost melted a fire escape in the crossfire. And I’m - you know, I’m not doing so bad, myself. Those things are getting stronger, and we need to be careful, but we’re getting stronger too.”

Despite herself, she smiles. “That _was_ pretty amazing, you know,” she says. “Don’t knock yourself out next time, but - well. Is _that_ what circumnavigating looks like to you?”

Tess’ cheeks flush pink. “Not - well, not _exactly,_ ” she says, “I’ve never - I mean, I can pass between the real world and the labyrinth, sort of, only I’ve never been in both places at the same time before. It was like they were…layering over each other.”

“You’re getting stronger,” Devi says, and shrugs. And a small voice in the back of her head whispers _’and I’m not.’_

It fills her stomach with something black and empty. She’s not the matador, or the Sheik - she’s not the pillar of strength. She’s the weak link. She’s the bronze medalist in a three-person race.

Tess is giving her a confused stare. “Devi?” She says. “Everything okay?”

Her fear isn’t strong enough. Dolls, knives, the dark place under her bed - a child’s fear, a pathetic fear. Sickness doesn’t come out of mortal terror. If she asked - if she asked Tess what _she_ was afraid of, she’d probably say something weird and touching - _’you’re always getting into fights with people. It’s terribly reckless, and one of these days it’ll get you killed’_ \- but Devi - does she even bother being afraid of things like that? People die all the time. Tess collapsed earlier this evening, and it hadn’t even occurred to Devi that she could have died - or, if she had died, that she should have wasted time being upset about it. She isn’t scared of losing everything. She already has. A million different everythings, torn out of her hands.

“You call that place the labyrinth,” she says after a moment, “is that what it is?”

“What?”

“Your dreamworld. The place with the black walls,” Devi says, by way of explanation. “I’d never seen it before. It’s a labyrinth?”

“It is,” Tess says, “would you like to see it?”

“I would.”

Tess slows to a stop and turns to face her. She’s such a slim, tiny creature, skin pale even in the summer’s evening, untouched by the bronze of hard, sunburned work. She could fit in the palm of Devi’s hand. “Alright,” she says, “um, I’ve never actually - here, give me your hands.”

Obediently, Devi holds her hands out, and Tess takes them. “Should I close my eyes? That’s what you usually do.”

Tess shrugs. “I guess,” she says, “I don’t think it really matters.”

Devi closes her eyes.

She waits.

She opens one eye. “Is it working?”

“Um,” Tess says, “I’ve never actually…moved someone else with me. Maybe I can’t?”

“You can,” Devi assures her, “you can do it. Is there something else I could do?”

“You could shut up and kiss me.”

“Will that help?”

“Probably not,” she admits, “but I’d like it.”

That’s logic Devi won’t argue with. She runs a hand along Tess’ jawline and against the back of her head, basking in the breathy gasp that pulls through her lips and the soft, short crop of styled black hair now between her fingers. No matter how long they’ve known each other, no matter how much skin Tess has shown her in the dark, she still covets this in its simplicity. When she kisses her, Tess sighs and tips her head, hands clutching at Devi’s arms even as they wrap around her waist.

The warm summer air, dimmed as it was in the evening shade of the alley, dips slowly into a freezing chill, but Devi barely notices. Tess is so warm against her, the soft unworked skin of her palms running electric trails across the skin exposed by her short sleeves. And her hair - and the untouched, silvery skin of her neck - 

Tess is the one who breaks away, turning her face to check their surroundings. A triumphant smile breaks out over her face, melting something in the pit of Devi’s stomach. “Look!” She says, “we’re here - I did it - here, this is the grove.” 

“I thought it was a labyrinth,” Devi says hesitantly, glancing around. There’s trees. It’s pretty dark here, but she isn’t having any trouble seeing, almost like the forest is illuminating itself. There’s something off about the bark, too, but she can’t put her finger on it.

“It is - well, the whole thing is. The grove’s at the center of the labyrinth, it’s like…” Tess wriggles her fingers impatiently, looking for words that won’t come to her. “So - imagine a cube,” she says, “with another, smaller cube in the middle.”

“How much smaller is the smaller one?” There’s a _lot_ of trees. Devi’s seen a couple trees in her life, but she’s never seen two trees right next to each other. These ones are taller than the trees in the park, and they’re - they’re weird.

“Much smaller,” Tess says after a second, like she’s been thinking about it. “Think a die inside of a - a mailbox. If a mailbox were a cube, which it’s not. Um. But anyway, the die would be the grove, and everything else around it would be - just rings and rings of floors in every direction, like when you cut open an onion, and each ring is a different layer of the labyrinth. This is the largest room in the whole place, but the labyrinth is way bigger - um…”

Devi hears her trail off, but her mind is moving far faster than she can manage. The trees are chokingly close, claustrophobic - it’s like there’s nothing above them, like any ceiling there is between them and the sky is made of branches, but if what Tess is saying is true, that the labyrinth goes out in six different directions, there must be a ceiling above them. They’re inside a building with no exit. “How high up does this room go?” She asks after a moment.

“Um - it’s hard to say,” Tess says, “the walls are constantly shifting, so it’s hard to get measurements in here, but I’d guess - thirty stories up on a good day?”

“Thirty feet?”

“Thirty _stories,_ ” Tess repeats, “three hundred feet. Give or take.”

Devi feels the ground shift under her feet. She’s never been more than fifty feet off the ground in her life. She’s never even been in a building with more than four floors. Now, she’s in a room that’s thirty stories cubed, in a labyrinth that’s almost infinitely larger. She feels like she’s _outside._

“Devi?” Tess is looking up at her, concern written plain on every feature. “Is everything alright? I know it’s - strange, I’m sure I can - we can go back if you don’t like it - “

She looks back at Tess, who is suddenly as fretful and embarrassed as she was the day they met, crumpling in on herself in a shame she alone seems privy to. “Of course I like it,” Devi says, thinking of Theseus and of delicate Ariadne, “it’s perfect.”

She’s never seen a more beautiful cage.

~~

Jimmy runs.

That’s what people do, right, when they fuck up - that’s what he does, that’s what he knows how to do. He takes his car out of the garage and slams on the accelerator, wind scraping at his face, lights thick and blurring against one another in his eyes.

When he was a child, he killed something in his hands, something small and vulnerable - something he’d been trusted to protect. Crushed it in his fingers. It doesn’t matter what he meant to do, it doesn’t matter his eyes had been wide with awe - the second he held something fragile, it shattered in his fingers.

There’s a place downtown that serves rich boys drinking on their daddy’s tabs almost exclusively, small and expensively decorated. Every bartender on the payroll knows him by name, which is alright for the shots of whiskey and all, but come eleven and they always try to talk to him about his feelings, so fuck that, basically. He gets four glasses deep before the man of the hour (slicked back hair, pencil-thin mustache, not _totally_ unfuckable if it comes to that) stares soulfully at him and says something soppy about feelings, and he throws a fiver on the counter and bolts.

At eleven-thirty, he slides into a hole in the wall where the music is loud and the establishment tends to look the other way if the male clientele want to slip cash into their waitress’ bra or fucking whatever and gets as many shots of pale tequila as he can balance on a tray. A redheaded woman tries to slide into the seat next to him, and he rams an elbow into her gut so hard she upsets a glass right off the edge of the table. Of course she loses it, right, why wouldn’t she, and real quick Jimmy is talking to a man with a set of shoulders reminiscent of animated gorillas in the post-reel Loony Toons and a voice that sounds like how chewing gravel feels, and he gets politely invited to leave the facility before he causes any more trouble. He gets politely invited about four times in the stomach, in fact, before a door slams in his face and he’s choking on the concrete.

At midnight, it starts to rain.

It’d been raining the first time he’d seen Edgar since before boarding school came barreling into his life. He’d been home for some stupid party, a celebration of Tess’ continued masculinization as she snatched the title of CEO off their father’s back. He’d been fifteen and spotty and growing in all the wrong places, and no one had told him Arturo was dead, no one had thought to send him a letter - 

Jimmy crawls his way into a liquor store, squeezing the damp out of his tie, at what he’d tentatively clock at two in the AM, and buys a bottle of Maker’s Mark. He can handle it himself, sitting in the back of his car, wherever his car is. There’s usually a place for him at the Drones’ Club this time of night, just a hardy fistful of stupid rich kids drinking their days as bachelors away until they can find a woman who’ll take them. He went to school with a few of them, too, and everything _that_ implies. All-boys boarding schools are a cesspool of hormones, dirty money, and can-do attitudes.

He’d hid in the bushes by the side of the garage after Tess broke the news to him, agonized by the news but humiliated by the fact that he cared at all, body possessed with huge, ugly sobs punctuated by vicious snarling and punching the wet ground until his fists were filthy with blood. Not the most dignified shit he ever did, sure, but he was hidden enough that Edgar hadn’t seen him on his way down the stairs from the apartment to the garage doors, and Jimmy had had the perfect view of him.

Edgar was nothing like the boys at school, with their sharp angles and mismatched legs, stumbling like newborn colts and aggressively focused on masculinity to hide their boundless insecurities. He was an adult, fully flourished, broad-shouldered and tall and perfectly aligned in his stance, his skin a sun-warmed shoreline and his eyes a glittering daybreak on the horizon of the sea. And his voice - shifting, tiding, crashing over him like waves in a vast and endless ocean, there with him in the brush, speaking kind words lost in the vicious whirl of the rain.

The road rises up to catch Jimmy’s feet and guides him down a wet alleyway, and he pulls the cork out of a bottle he doesn’t remember buying with his teeth. Another hole in the wall, another broken glass - this city is nothing but a chorus of dropped tableware, fragile and cracking in its ugly hands. If ever a city were Jimmy, if ever he were a city, it would be New York, where nothing sleeps and nothing stays and it shatters, a raising crescendo of screaming and cursing and wasted money. Fuck this city, fuck the stench that rises up from the sidewalk grates in billows of warm air, fuck the way it festers like black mold in the crannies of the gutters and the smiles of the businessmen, fuck the fat he’s been chewing since someone pressed it between his molars before he even had teeth. Fuck this city and fuck his name…

At some point, he gets a magnum. It’s a good size. If he hit someone in the head with it, how long would it take them to bleed out - how bad would it be…the glass probably wouldn’t even shatter on their head.

When the sun rises, the hardcore places start closing their doors, and Jimmy winds his way through streets he doesn’t recognize, where the fuck did he park his car - lost in New York? How do you get lost in New York? The streets are _numbered_ , he can get his ass home if he needs it, if he ought to go home - when he twists his fingers in a fist, he can feel the crumple of Anne’s black dress like it’s still in his hand, her sneer, her streaming mascara, her ugly words - the way she looked at his sister, predatory, hungry - a vulture closing in on a carcass to feed. Which of the siblings is on the side of the road, split open and gutted, swarming with black flies, he can’t be sure. All he knows is that she’s hungry, and she’s waiting for the twitching to stop. Bitch, she’s a bitch - who, Anne or Tess? The picture, the promotional photograph for the merger deal, the one that went out in the paper, his sister sitting like Sheba and his wife standing behind her - they’re circling him, they’re hunting for weakness in the dark - fucking hell - 

There’s always pubs, of course, those tend to open early in the morning, ostensibly for breakfast but really, if they’ve got shit on tap, it’s always time for the sweet nectar to flow. That’s a bee thing, isn’t it, nectar? Or is it a mythology thing? The gods - the gods drank nectar or something, or milk and honey? Aren’t honey and nectar the same thing?

_Warm summer sun, a wave of floral something and the scent of fresh-turned dirt, and Edgar there, another child, holding his hands and teaching him to skate backwards on rollerskates -_

The bartender-pub-owner-guy gives him a look like he’s about to talk to him sternly and send him out the door, but Jimmy pulls a crumpled hundred out of his pocket and all of a sudden he’s all smiles, yes sir we _do_ have a very significant selection of seating, and would you have any preference of - ? Jimmy crawls into a booth in the corner and dozes for two hours, warm from the light streaming through the window, blinking in and out of consciousness - he doesn’t let himself sleep, not really, because every time he drifts he sees those shoulders, the long arms, the smell of summer and motor oil - the flush of his face, delirious with pleasure, glowing with sweat in the low light touching the leather upholstery of the seat - and then he fucks up, and he - 

Jolts awake, stomach churning, weak with the pressure of failure, desperately turns his thoughts to this _ugly fuckin’ city, mildew and moss and rot and ragged lonely suicides choking up the gutters_ until he drifts, and it all happens again.

Stupid stupid stupid, he’s so fucking stupid, fat-fingered and greedy like a kid who can’t get his hand out of the candy jar ‘cause he’s got too much in his fist. It wasn’t enough, wasn’t enough to hear Edgar’s hitching breath in the car, wasn’t enough to know how he felt, he _had_ to push, had to take take take because that’s all he does, that’s all _they_ do. The Reeds Family, ladies and gentlemen, just a bunch of goddamn cowards snatching happiness from the unresisting smiles of people who deserve better than them. 

_’She got caught with some cross-dressing greaser faggot back in the thirties. Broke up the only engagement she ever got her hands on…’_

It hadn’t been enough to know that Edgar wanted him, and it hadn’t been enough just to touch him, just to feel the way his muscles moved under his shirt, just to hold him, not enough not enough - 

Why had the endless night guided his feet into 1938? Things happen for a reason - they’d been pulled back by the card the second time, stolen from a deck, but what had brought them there in the first place? That place, it’s just pathways, it’s lines from one place to another. It was random. Normally, it’s random. Isn’t it? 

It could have been Carson, or those Gogmagog things. Only, the first thing they saw was that melting, uh, metal shit - the stairs? The alleyway, roasting in the blaze of Tenna’s power. Those women, those women carried him to Carson and those dark - why them, why then? Things happen for a reason.

Around five in the evening, Jimmy stumbles his way out into the sunlight, looking for all intents and purposes like an upturned mop dark with grime, deep in the paint and ready to make some fucking mistakes in the charitable spirit of having a good time. He took a look at himself in the mirror of the pub bathroom for approximately twenty seconds, for what it’s worth. Scrubbed off the trail of dried blood that affixed itself to his nose at some point last night and put one of his eyebrows back in order, for what that’s worth. Unlike his hair tonic, the pomade he nicked out of Tess’ room about three days ago is sculpting his look in place like a monster. Unfortunately, it’s also sculpting the flattened, sleep-worn edges. God bless Posner’s, he guesses. That one’s a lost cause.

’38, the summer before he was born. What did he do?

What did _Tess_ do?


End file.
